It is yet another sobering Thursday dawn in the township,
early birds are catching taxis to various places of consensual servitude, and
school children are throwing buckets of filth ridden water down drains or on
dried up patches of lawns scattered like islands in the middle of dust roads.
The previous night was serenely horrid with wailing dogs
howling at the moon and some blurting speakers playing mundane music on repeat.
So the morning feels like a curse of stale light, as first
rays of the day creep through my stringy curtains.
Infants cry a couple of shacks down the street; others run
water into steel kettles from my neighbor’s tap.
Unashamedly miscreant young women walk out of their yards
still in pajamas to manicure their nails starting their calm and pleasant days
of gold-digging.
A senile twenty something year old boy with a dislodged
steering wheel from a car wreck makes his rounds about the shack city.
With pouted lips spitting sounds of a rundown engine, and with
invisible gears in hand and Flintstone like heel brakes crushing dust particles,
he stops in front of one strange yard.
He parks his imaginary automobile by dropping the worn wheel
clasped in dirt black hands, and enters a shack hurriedly like a messenger of
horse bet winnings.
The sing song of early morning toils fills the air, with
distant hooters calling on late farers to sprint towards their gaping doors.
It is on a winter’s chill such as this that one often dreads
the outside lavatory with mixed feelings of rage and an anus gurgling
flatulence.
But bowls have no master, and trudging along with a
cigarette at hand and a shriveled up newspaper, I exit the humid zinc house,
into the bluest sky hanging over tin roofs of yet another ghetto penitentiary.
In no time, school children would be singing anthems,
leaving unemployed single mothers to start their gossip cabals and excursions
towards fat cake vendors.
Among corrugated walls on termite smitten wooden logs many
have made naively charming homes with migrant mine-workers.
Once sexy sirens of our juvenile wet dreams, many are now burdened
by triads of infants without paternal bonds, loose souls in search of cuddles
and warm cum.
Their shrill voices always calm a mind ransacked by infernal
dreams, dreams which often require a woman’s touch to sweeten their grip.
One always finds households with up to six young women,
stranded in droves fending for life through one night stands, or grandmother’s
pension or even children’s social grant.
They would be head-wrapped in stockings, veracious bodies clad
in worn rosy gowns received as gifts from first lovers who left them belly
filled with sperm and futures deferred.
But with their eternal strength, they waltz still their heels in woolen loafers and buttocks
swung towards main roads of this dead place.
Little children still homebound and unafforded kindergartens
start their daily alchemies, pilling heaps of soil in designs of their
imaginings while radio speakers boom their day’s doses of tragedies.
Like midgets stranded between pillars of rusted steel, they
chase after dogs and falling over their steps giggle uncontrollably smeared
with soil and bruises.
I overhear one urchin screaming to its mother that dogs want
to urinate on her and upon my slow exit from my ritual ablution vigil, Matsekela slinks into the yard,
hung-over and buzzing, asking for coins to add up for a beer.
He believes what caused his condition is the sole cure for
it, a myth believed by many in our township, just as we also know that every
bar of soap does any cleaning chore.
We gather two empty bottles into a plastic bag; dexterously
enough not to have the two clicking against one another so as to wake up the
whole neighborhood to our alcoholic escapade.
The street is gaining pace, and ladies with bags flung over
sloppy shoulders kick stones with polished sandals while their stay at home men
yawn about their makeshift lawns and fences.
Patchwork gates slide aside for it is a norm to have
uninvited visitors at 8am here, and at the tuck-shop we find a scrubbing
dusty-kneed sister who does not even bother to question a purchase of liquor at
this hour.
Then the day begins in a place where even flies buzz louder
than airplanes, and with my friend another binge to stupefy senses commences.
It is four hours and eleven beers in Lebelo’s shack that we sense the midday sun balloon exploding over
our shadows, while he viciously keeps aflame a lecture about a Jesus who was
born of an extra-terrestrial bloodline.
LKJ keeeps thumping in my chest, I am about to gloomily pass
out.
We were hungry having not eaten a thing since the ferocious
tour started, and burning froth scrapping tripe was building an acid mine in my
stomach.
But Lebelo was at
his element and could care less about drowsy ears floating in his stuffy shack,
a stoned philosopher full of fermented malt and barley.
He spontaneously bursts into a jumbled verse in a language
of his own mustering – Twagah Fofo,
and the recital borders on a séance with an un-exorcised spirit that possess
any man who dares intone these incendiary syllables.
He suggested a local brew of ginger beer mixed with a tinge
of battery acid, and I digressed, followed keenly on my heels by my staggering
friend – the sole friend alive from my childhood spent on these decrepit
streets.
Snaking our way home around the corner felt like a
pilgrimage to Mecca, and the blazing heat that renders winter infernal for a
couple of hours smeared mirages on the red soil and double visions assailed us
like punch-lines from a sickening joke.
He suggests we hustle for another beer at a shack nearby,
and I decline citing rumors that when you buy one beer at that backyard
shebeen, you will never stop going to same house in spite of all others.
A fridge full of beers piled on a long dead body of Jah
knows who, that ought to unnerve even the best atheist alcoholic this side of
the Losberg Mountain.
It is at such horrendous times that Matsekela and I get assaulted by zealous recollections of our Nyayabinghi days, speaking a dialect
that simulated Jamaican speech, we sang and chanted hypnotic hymns in stupefied
nostalgia.
I was born here, among garbage piles searching for
razorblades and lost dolls for my sisters in the company of scavenging goats
and stray dogs.
***
Up the road comes Matlakala,
a one time girlfriend to our Rastafarian guru, now dead of that disease.
Knock-kneed and buxom in her tight fitting American Flag
print dress, she is that ever cheerful soul, a crude beauty commonly lusciously
built, once schooled in a preparatory for imbeciles.
There is no jester better on my street, as she now manages
to find enduring anecdotes to humiliate us drunken louts from today onwards.
Her dimpled face dotted with ripe pimples, she always looks
too innocent for her age.
But perhaps we all cannot bear signs of innocence, once we
tasted the bile of life’s dish.
Matsekela decides
to pass on and head home, and I intend to slump on my unmade bed to resume
slumber and ease the throbbing hunger chipping my insides.
It nags me that I have recently heard people whisper about Tlaki’s deteriorating health condition
and physical abuses she endures under metallic stacks of knuckles of one known Air Force Four Gang member, but all I
care to bring to mind are happy memories she brews on every smile she shares.
Her last donor of disease, the whip wielding lover, is now
said to have been arrested a couple of weeks ago, sentenced to 15 years for the
murder of a foreign shop owner among other rewards.
Rumor has it that he would organize gangs of milk-faced
initiates still nursing clotted penises, to raid and rob various shops believed
to be owned by maPakistane.
And stories of the event of his arrest leave nothing to the
imagination as I recall dozing off slightly, before my mother knocks on the
door I locked after finding it unlocked and nobody insight.
Then follows slurs about my incessant binging, raucous
remarks from a hurt mother seeing her son lose control over his lost life.
And it hurts me as well, to see my abandon and reckless
behavior ruining my best years.
I obviously feel compelled to restore some semblance of
order in my life but I often fail.
Strange that such erratic change of temperament starts with
a fight with a woman in one’s life, as that was the case for my sobbing and
self-flagellation.
This has created a monster that often cranes its rear during
those drunken bouts of obsolete courage to face failures in life, looking into
my empty soul and seeing a million soggy eyes.
And as all men make vain attempts to conceal their pain,
these sessions with my friend around these arid avenues of a depraved township
have somewhat called myself to myself in a drastic manner.
In between stints of melancholic dozes of tormented sleep,
the past couple of dreamless nights have provided me with some introspective
moments which border on being spiritual epiphanies.
My inner core seems to want to crawl through labyrinthine
reservoirs of my animus – that monster carved in my image, with a tongue that
burns and words that can topple mountains.
Slow as the process was, one would understand that long
standing denials of such an entity co-existing with my ‘normal’ self could take
a while to acknowledge, I feel I have however reached a precipice of
discovering the nature and reasons that engendered this virulent alter-ego.
I am a monster of my making, which I can accept first and
foremost.
But as with all social beings, much of my psychic
abnormalities have been cleaved from my surroundings and more incidentally
familial relations.
Ok, there are undeniable traumas existent within everyone
born into poverty, and those scars are what characterize poverty as an unspoken
genocide.
Genocide of inter-relational faculties in any disposed
person breeds reclusive persons; genocide of moral ideals creates socio-paths
and narcissists.
Genocide of personal emotional acuity that is often already
paralyzed by ages of depravity gives rise to sentiments of inferiority.
And I now realize that the worst abuses that many hurl are
bred by a feeling of inadequacy, and more so, a feeling of never being
adequately understood for furnaces of emotions reeling within their breasts.
And when one person, (considering that we all are inundated
with these scars); when such hurt entities engage in any form of union, the
inevitable is the entropic catastrophes of constant aggression and reciprocal
attitudes to deal with such aggressions.
Like the lady in the next shack who wails each night from a
barrage of icy slaps, these and other secrets cannot be hidden through thin tin
walls that stand inches away from one another.
She screams languid recitations of curses, and boils water
on a paraffin stove to defend herself and her children, but as always, the
contraption loses her war before it could become a swift weapon in the hands of
a woman in travail.
I remember mother used to do that ritual, when assaulted by
her shaft-sinker lover during our stint in another slum which was aptly named Phumasbethane.
Hers, like those of the woman next door is a defense
mechanism that is resilient and not easily overcome, that can be transplanted
onto her children vicariously through exposure, as it took years of
socialization and actual encoding into what one can call her ‘emotional DNA’.
And this mechanism is endemic in all downtrodden minds as
science tells us, because starved people can be creative people, for they often
are the ones who dare peek behind curtains of life’s tragic shadowy characters.
But creativity and its weight on an incapacitated creator
can also be a well spring of criminality.
Men’s wanton actions are their responsibility, yes, and for
the mean emasculations of their dreams, who will forever bear karma’s yoke of
awe besides their women?
Yet the monster fathomed by a patriarchal system that made
pillars of shackled men, raised by single mothers who transposed her
responsibilities to the youngling due to migrant labor and other criminal
endeavors, that is I.
A medley of cries and yells of commands at my siblings
characterized my adolescence; I therefore suppose that the cruel nature of my
nurture has its genesis there among such corporal rituals.
And mingled with mother’s chiding voice and my inner screams
for resolutions I cannot name, I drift into a dream that is more a nightmare
than anything I have dreamt before.
I dream I am stranded in a city made up of many cities and
towns I have once visited, but only certain sections of such places are molded
into one mazy space in which I feel lost and trapped.
Sleep echoes through inebriation and all types of bad
thoughts begin as I am summoned by familiar concoctions of music that stream
from wide open doors to shacks receiving owners returning from their servitude.
The blistering heat of winter sweat under stale blankets fog
my eyes, and I stumble over my laptop playing Miles Davis odes to some
unknowable heaven.
The day draws to an end when I awake from my torpor five
hours since Matsekela left, and
screams of children playing hop scotch fills my brain with mucus smeared images
of happy brown discards of a generation without a future.
Inside my shack, I have not cooked yet and the evening is
knocking beats on a night that is a prelude to the weekend, but hunger
persists.
With the fridge empty and unplugged to save units of
electricity rations purchased with piss and sweat from illegal connectors, I
begin preparing our staple diet of porridge and onion gravy.
Mother is gone to a vigil for a girl who died a week ago,
whose family could not afford to bury in time.
This she tell me when she returns, eyes streaming with pain,
because this was only a twenty three year old child, who had four children now
left with their grandmother in a rundown RDP house.
School uniforms converge for dust lessons outside as children
gear for sunset games, and other mothers scream for their rascals to change or
something like that.
And the night begins with me sober, an insomniac at a rope’s
end, thinking hard about life’s comedy and other lesson bought with tears.
***
The most intricate of wonders about location life is the
near absent lack of music in all random forms and ethnic intonations.
One shack would unleash its latest find on the record market
and two shacks down the street another novice from the rural areas would be hurling
traditional beats into a cacophony of disconcerting noise.
Then there are children singing along in all kinds of broken
cords and harmonies, with every third house having its concert enjoyed by
vagabonds lounging in the heat of a winter morning’s sun.
Women would have swept their sections of the street during
their early morning resolve to clean their yards and catch a load of death
notices and news about exposed witches.
Patches of clean portions would be seen running along the
dusty road, also announcing a house whose girls are untidy and spoilt.
Clothes would be hanging on wires tied to poles and nappies
always spoke of newborns mushrooming all over the slum.
And when the sun has risen to a bored craze, there would be that
droning hum of repetitive songs gone wordless in failing speakers.
Stepping outside, only the rusty glare of sun rays bewilder
me about my whereabouts, then I remember I am home.
After a long shuffle under lace draping and newspapers on
worn table tops, vases decorating makeshift side tables made of empty shoe
boxes and an asbestos plank, through my mother’s purse, a coin to get me two
drags of wood tasting cigarettes is fished.
I rush to the nearest shop and smell that sordid air
breathed by all desperate souls around, colorful stenches of uncollected garbage
and clogged drainage drums.
Bucket lavatories leaning for dear life against falling
fences, stand hidden in backyards of the most transparent squalor.
Then, a sudden flash of memory about Osama Bin Bade’s arrest hits me smack on my nauseated face.
It is said that, or more precisely, Lebelo paints a picture of one ingeniously daring attempt to escape
by one evangelically dreaded and revered criminal who groomed apprentices for
knife fights.
Bin Bade is an
alleged member of a malicious gang that specializes in prison breaks,
sanctioning escapes and orchestrating some of infamous rackets in the prisons
of this region.
But it always takes one little profoundly inane mistake to
get caught.
The story goes that after infamous escapades by his incensed
initiates, an ID document belonging to a foreign national was among the
inventory they brought with their loot one evening.
After the inevitable depletion of the winnings, which
normally takes a day or two, the gang was in desperate need for cash.
That is when a genius idea pops up from one girlfriend of
this feared leader of prison riot brigades, which suggests that the document be
returned for a ransom.
And during those torturous withdrawal stages when nyaope is being drained from one’s body,
the idea could very well seem sober and legitimately achievable.
It goes without saying that police were informed and an
investigation team sent to the shack identified through the girlfriend’s
incessant visits.
But the chase that ensued is what seems to be the climax of
the story according to various orators.
When police car veered around the corner to our street, a
whistle contest seemed to have commenced.
This served as a warning call employed by the gang – a
precise and distinctive whistle, which is echoed by tens of pursed lips of
rampaging children made men by a blade.
The culprit sprung from his comfort and made for the back of
his shack, cutting through shrubs dried up on rusted mattress springs.
Up this fence, through this gate always found behind
neighborly neighbors’ shacks, past that shack only to see a white police
officer sprinting the lap behind him with red-eyed rage.
Any smoker’s problem during an unexpected need for flight is
their lungs; chest heaving coals and volcanic air while the body attempts to
consume as much oxygen as diabolically possible.
And they do collapse, or feel as though they are collapsing,
a feeling resembling folding knees under a good tackle by a former rugby player
turned law enforcer.
The black detective didn’t try to make pursuit at all, on
condition of his stomach as the joke goes.
He rather opted to hobble through a field of potholes in
reverse, then forwards, scrapping their vehicle on glass islands on the roads
while losing kidney life in the process.
Eventually cornered and in cuffs, he was ceremoniously
ushered into the back of the vehicle, saluted of course by his reverent
comrades, apprentices and foot soldiers.
It now occurs to me that this is tuck-shop where the news
became a story that formed a legend that is worshipped by tens of young boys
leaving school for initiation schools and wishing for stints in prison to get
their numbers.
I mean, I have no ill feelings towards the resourceful
brother; besides, he even gives me cigarettes on credit at times of desperate
cravings.
The day snails along like growing shadows of black boxes
slated on red soil of my street of oblivion, I have come here to rescue myself
from my hand and the sneaky twittering of birds adds some respite to my urban
torment.
And with intermittent hooting of faraway taxis and whirling
whines of exhausted engines that never travel further than this township, I
decide that last night’s left-over food could be a feast to a staggering mind
and calm to a growling stomach.
Mother is not here again, must have left to lend a hand peeling
vegetables for the funeral cuisine that often turns into a feeding scheme with
catholic resolve and manners.
She will at least eat with the rest of the women who venture
tirelessly every weekend to some bedside of a bereaved parent, or to some wedding
or dowry negotiations.
I have become accustomed to women sitting side by side with
grumpy old men on behalf of their sons pleading for a bride who will soon turn
out to be wench milked by every erection around 99.
Ninety Nine.
Ninety Nine is the
name that has clung to this place’s persona, a shack extravaganza, cramped and
hatefully dark.
Many families without houses were forever being relocated
from one plot of a veteran boer harboring resentment for the free kaffir, to
another under operations campaigned by lousy municipal workers during
electioneering time.
Together during that year of our lord 1999, when gold mines
were employing a lot of non-tax paying migrant labor, hundreds of loiterers
from Phumasbethane and unknowable
hordes of newcomers were brought here and given stands to build their
ramshackle homes with temporary hopes for brick houses.
Today it still stands, neighboring a grave yard, were many
of our loved ones lie unattended.
Boulders scattered about shacks located at corners of streets
have become hangout spot, where drug peddlers chill after dark, and cigarette
and vegetable vendors own by day their wares shriveled like faces of torn aging
fruit.
Yet another Friday prepares itself steadily as the day leers
past noon, schools are out and easy catch walks the main roads with nagging
slowness of purpose.
They are caught in the heat of gossip, boys pester the
willing and giggles show clumsy grins teething for a brutal night to introduce
Saturn’s day.
I decide to take a walk, having lost hope that Matsekela would show up with a plan
again.
It is repulsive how we clamor for treats such as satellite
televisions only to create galaxies of antennas on our ocean of shacks.
Down and beaten boys in pants that look too young for their
age stand leaning against ‘fuse boxes’ with smart phones lisping hits from hip
hop degenerates making more money than most African states.
Women get off taxis carrying bags full of just diets sold
cheaply at plastic retail stores or taxi rank kiosks made for the sole purpose
of those who always forget important items.
Cars that would otherwise be parked near kitchen windows or
in backyards of houses start rattling their bones as the sun calms its blows
and a chill consumes the air again.
The night becomes a pot stewing in the final heat of a
hearth of rags, and you can see hurried aims twinkling on faces of those with
plans.
It is always a rhythm we follow each week and month, either
on the winning side of the coin war or not.
Those with broader smiles and puffed up noses salivating
from KFC toxins must have received their weekly wages, and obviously children
will run fastest after their heroes with a prize bull diced into hot wings of
force-fed chicken.
Some child beats an odd rhythm on a trash can, and I decide
to turn back, literally turn right around and head in the same direction I was
coming from to a point of walking right next to my previous footsteps printed
on dry earth.
I see others stretch wires out of doors opened for the exit
of loudspeakers for the night’s chorus of mayhem and I know I will not have a
pinch of sleep again tonight, but I have no plan of escape.
Where is Matsekela?
We could make a plan together; go to a loan shark and buy liters of plonk and
listen to music until we pass out under a tree we like in his mother’s yard.
Unlocking the door and sitting in the cold splendor of rags
tied into a doll house in a junk yard, it was then that I felt that all life is
a garbage heap that is only surmounted by those who can turn rubbish to gold.
I needed gold, and here was a trash town in the middle of
nowhere named after a year that is of no import.
Perhaps it was named after a radio station as often
suggested, I am not certain, but what the hell, it has youth with radios on and
drinking behind steel paneled windows in a privacy that they believe exists for
them in a world which allows nobody a secret.
And that senile urge to sleep during the mid hours of an
afternoon buries me with reminiscence, silhouettes of a woman.
Self-flagellation begins.
Mother should be back to check if the shack has not burned
down with me drunk on a pint of Skipa sea
ntekana.
***
Battery powered light bulbs flicker through nail holes,
corrosion holes and other holes, trailing out doors of fortunate families who
managed to raid a broken down car before others.
Candle light battles on in other over-crowded steel cages,
and the music gains pitch in the silencing trauma of a night.
Faults and mistakes are made up for in the dark, through
night-long binges and orgies involving young girls who were ten when you were
twenty-two.
The rhythm is humming the night away, dancing in the coals
of brokenness dressed in designer clothes, with names misspelled at the labels.
I need to get out also, and brace my eyes for toils only reserved
for veterans of this place, seeing in the dark, because I hear people greeting
me without any idea of their identities.
This dark part of a township in the darkest shadow of a
spooky mountain is for the brave, and I know of many who have lost their lives
on its sewer drench muddy pits.
I have heard of grown men losing their penises to machetes
wielded by blistered boys who considered circumcision at a hospital a
sacrilege.
That way, ba ho etsa pholo, as they would say.
Then Matsekela
arrives unannounced, announced only by my creaking gate clearly tossed by a
drunken hand who could not make the custom-made locking mechanism.
And so another night begins.
Mbhaulas flicker
embers from rags torched for warmth, with fire lovers spreading scotched knees
over flames that warm not their bodies, but merely sends them into reveries.
Dancing flames tell stories of a dancing night just beyond
the dark, in glitter-ball dazed venues with tiled floors which can never seem
to absorb any crime.
Around these fires they listen to the racket and think hard
about humming moths of their glowing minds.
Underneath prickly branches of an ancient peach tree we
stand counting notes for financing of a wild ride into a broom breaking mess.
Matsekela always
has the road map, which tavern to start off with and which has more comfortable
couches for customary blackout stunts.
But the one with slippery white tiles bears rancid
recollections for my head pounding with dub-stepped sounds heard from the back
seat of a car we hopped into without who it belonged to.
Where we were headed, a friend died grotesquely on tiled
floors which could not hide the blood spilled from his immaturely slit neck and
wounded arm.
Shrill screams of girls sent terror-stricken juveniles off
dance floors, their chair, crates and worn couches.
This was a place where old antipathies could be avenged by
mystery assailants holding a grudge inherited from your long dead uncle.
I remember the rush for a single door by hundred of matadors
frenzied by beer and cheap whisky.
Others scurried towards the lavatories and others invaded
the sacred DJ booth, turned the glass box into a cell or some glittering
sacrificial shrine.
He twitched a couple of times after we (his friends) had
returned for him after realizing the rush was away from a life and death
struggle of our concern.
He died with bloody hands smearing evidence on most of our
heads, jackets and pants; leaving only his name baked with black stains on our
memories.
The tiles would be clean tonight, or already soiled by new
dirt and blood spilled from bottles and plastic cups which seem to be ever
refilled by a magic trick.
But we were headed there, huddled together, wind-parched in
car without a windscreen, towards the only one decent hangout in a shabby town
with shabby hangouts.
We knew what to expect but we felt a new anticipation with
every turn and speed hump.
Self-immersion.
Unblemished thighs swinging tranquilly to songs of abandon,
losing their chastity and morale on dance floors because they were cheated of
the better views of life coveted.
Sleazy teen twerkers breaking pelvic bones to twitter lisps,
and spicy fingers of a disc jockey tracing movement on mixers, even thought we
knew he did nothing.
Heads bobbed, and sultry moves brushed against erect penises
of wall flowers, and the bile of stale drink simmering in my stomach whirled
with the Technicolor lights facades creeping on bodies and floors and ceilings
and walls.
Music eventually gets inaudible, and only a thumping in the
gut, like echoes that ransack bone marrow, smelting their threads.
***
I am woken up by biting chill singing through slits and
holes in the shack walls, a whirling wind rattling the wires on the roof and
other mysterious sounds blend with glacial gusts as I find myself underneath a
pile of pillows.
Molten head fixed against a stained sheet, sliding under
rock hard pillows stuffed with old clothes and still knowing that the pangs of
winter are only clutching a morbid grip around town.
I need a fix beyond food, a joint, a quart, something
because masturbating would be sacrilegious in this satanic freezer.
I brace myself with courage of a horse yielding its load and
lapping silent waters of a putrid stream, and unhinge the lock and exit
silently, knowing mother has heard me.
She would have wished to talk about the funeral I suppose,
but I can’t stomach foreign melancholy when my stew is hardening and loosing
taste.
Outside, Sunday is gloomy, broody clouds darkening crisp
skies with a rage chorusing dust rising like plumes towards heaven.
Silhouettes of draped women in the whirlpool of dust and
brazen air make for a haunting sight, but on I must go in this glazy light to
pay Lebelo a wakeup call.
He is already up, watching pornographic videos at 7am,
headache and fever building fires under his skin.
He says his condition can only be remedied by vodka, after
one confusing night of celebrating a 90 year old ladies birthday.
That turns out to be where he went after stretching me at my
home front, in the wee hours of dawn, having blacked out several times during
our bored binge in a place that cried with the blood of our maimed friend.
Clouds were getting darker when we ventured into the dust
storm, teeth grinding grains of sordid coal and burnt rags from garbage heaps
still simmering their last embers of night fires.
Even goats were confused in their favorite ditches, with
passage ways filling with stray walkers trying for shelter from a blistering
wind from a wet sky.
Light crept in intervals to remind us that it was day during
this nightly clime when we reached our destination; and we were warned that we
would find booze very scarce on this day.
And indeed shelves were near empty, fridges holy in their sanctimoniously
fluorescent light bulbs.
Compromises were necessary, so even the meanest blend would
suffice for fuel to a day of worship and hymns and supplications for those laid
to rest the day before.
Somewhere must drafted in the wind, obscure and muddled up
with wafting bellows of taxis for an ever travelling populace - the curse of
departures.
Many were returning to cities and other outskirts, chasing
florid avenues of suburbia for the grime they eventually carry home in loads
over weekends.
Others were temporary workers, for the lord of course, like
that old man we meet just outside the liquor store, lamenting his worn-soles of
righteousness, evangelizing drunks who braved the cold winter’s blows for swigs
of satan’s piss.
We see many around here, and Lebelo voices his disdain for them, which he actually showed to
this self-same man a couple of weeks ago by way of a flying brick intently
propelled for collision with his skull.
Dogs dangle torn plastic bags dripping of offal and tripe;
flies cannot disturb them with their nosy flights in this turbulent clime.
One, and then others loom like spies in a town defamed by
its dog population.
Dogtown it could be named, because every yard has a breeding
bitch that barks and howls and snarls all kinds of terror.
Some neighborhoods are said to be ambushed by infestations
of rats, but ours chose a deck of puppies and is now left gripping of an epidemic
of hounds.
Brown shabby tailed dogs, saggy nippled dogs and ever horny
dogs.
My neighbor’s three-legged dog that unnerves me with its
pleading eyes every time the clink of plates being washed echoes through the
shack.
Dogs that breed puppies that seem like illegitimate children,
stray hounds afraid of nothing human.
Adopted dogs from white masters who went on holiday, puffy
and cute poodles lost by maids who are now beating up their children for not
keeping them on leashes.
Lebelo says
exterminatory measures were proposed by the powers that be, dished out in a
form of a feast where the dogs were systematically poisoned.
I still wonder if there were feeding pits or some
unfortunate volunteer had to walk a jaw snapping mile with fatal buffets aimed
at being the last meal for salivating dogs.
But the plan had backfired I hear, because the poison
functioned more like a laxative and the dogs’ hunger grew in atrocious
proportions.
The dogs ate grass and vomited all over the streets, lawns
and yards.
They fed and got fat on rotten rodents who stole their
poisoned meals turned delicacy, mated and littered thousands of bastards
wishing for savage kicks on blistered ribs.
But fuck dogs, and that lone donkey wondering the dusty
scene.
We are headed to Setlamatlama
to share spoils of our quest for nourishment, so dogs can take over town as
they have with our sleep.
And we hope this plague of canine scoundrels will never be
legends of a place gone in tatters, but guardians of junk pile of bones where new-born
scavenging dogs can dig for new masters.
***
Through the misty view of soiled skies and whirlwinds, a
young man appears followed by a band of about fifteen dogs.
Soon after his dreadful marauding band of assortment of iron
grinning canines passes our agitated skins, noses sniffing our fear floating
violent with the air, we see a band of sangomas enter a yard of shacks.
This conspicuous yard is the only one that seems quite
large, and one could see that these are those first stands allocated those
moved to this here Extension One.
Setlamatlama, as
one of the born and bred breeds of this hallowed grave is no stranger to
quarrel.
And as we eventually find out, he has had a bout with one sangoma
boy at that compound.
Ninety Nine is a
shack heap, not too old but not too young either.
But Extension One
has seen an interesting evolution happen in a rather quick span of time,
between the hiring and the firing of uprooted mine workers.
After its pandemic of shacks mushrooming in the swampy farm
of a deserter were proving an eye sore for electioneering pundits, town
planners had to device a way of building the matchbox houses for these people
in a way of keeping promises made by dead or dying presidents.
These measly, two roomed apparitions were to contend with
space cramped by shack architecture, so the result was the yards became
smaller, allowing for ‘informal extensions’ of these paralyzing dormitories for
the plebian.
But with time and bonuses and pennies paid after
retrenchments, some people forced new designs against the perilous walls of
asbestosis roofed pet cages.
Shacks leaned against bricks to make for kitchens and extra
bedrooms as families burst with illegitimate children and growing sons who
could stand not their pregnant sisters and proselyte step-fathers.
This eventually created an intriguingly frustrating sight of
erratic design esthetics, patchwork houses created by persons who though not
entirely unintelligent, could often times seem too pompous for their worth.
Stingy young men with expensive clothes and stuck up girls
who seem prettier than many yet frustratingly morose, these were the characters
of the youth in Extension One.
A place of pretend affluence strained by the glaring irony
of brick and shack sculptures which are their eternal yoke of unrealized
dreams.
Even the holes in my underwear make life unbearably cold,
each icy slap spiky with every step in the moaning wind, makeing anticipation a
castration.
We decide to tear open two left over sachets of Sambuca,
once lost but now found in Lebelo’s
coat pockets, and we are not the only ones on a prowl.
Wiry louts smacking of brutal attitudes, the ones with guts
to jot slurs with excrement on lavatory walls, walk with bravado, among these
plumes of soil that leaves every dog blurry eyed.
And on we walk after sips and wanton littering on a sordid
street swept by some demonic wand of winter shudders.
We arrive at Setlamatlama’s
house burning with Sambuca oiling our empty stomachs, and he prepares a joint
for us as we mix the beverages in amidst chatter about last night and the
weather and the loss of dignity.
The floor bedecked with Old
Buck, Vin Coco and Mokador, we commence another stunt at
this early Sunday hour, hymns from a nearby church calling angles to our side.
***
The feud is said to have began at a tuck-shop around the
corner where an effeminate young man in sangoma regalia was in the company of
yet another sultry teen seductress also in the process of initiation into the
rites of healing.
Like any hot-blooded lout, Setlamatlama decided to lay his tongue bare on the woman’s ears,
with exotic coaxes of erotic yearning he felt for her person.
She was flattered it appears, but as is custom among
apprentices of those sanctuaries for the mentally deranged and spiritually
adept, she was declining his advances.
So, further persuasion was necessary, he thought.
Only to find a bevy of flung arms screaming insults, this
young man with a bow-leg defending his fellow ritualist.
In the manner synonymous with infuriated women, he beat his
thigh in utter indignation and exasperation; Setlamatlama on the verge of uttering humiliating guffaws that
eventually burst out disturbing other customers who joined the mirth.
The two were utterly stone cold jinxed by rage, his frothing
mouth spitting more ancestrally charged curses indulging Setlamatlama’s future consorts and demeaning his virile escapades
with women who will never be satisfied.
Setlamatlama lost his
cool soon after that slur, and hurled a hailstorm of fists and a barrage of
slaps on the shrieking midget crouched between him and his prospective
girlfriend.
Red and white drapes danced about a heap of incensed
traditionalists in a Muslim establishment.
This tuckshop had never witnessed taut thighs in frequent
and crazed stamping and arms of a drum beating midget showing beneath the
mayhem of cloth and skin.
She was defending her friend of course, also starting her
own adage of spellbinding utterances, her voice becoming hoarse as of a man
with rusted lungs.
That was Setlamatlama’s
cue to leave the scene of his sacred crime against the bearers of unspoken
gifts, and as he tells this story, he keeps referring to the yard of witches as
though all poverty in this town is bred by their maladies.
His phone rings, and he answers it hesitantly.
The caller on the other end is Dragon, demanding his ration of WorldCall
airtime to peddle in some Potchefstroom prison cell.
Setlamatlama
excuses himself, something nefarious in his eyes, to go and serve his life-time
debt and make a quick purchase, but with us well aware of the weather war
outside, we recede in on our beer crates and volunteer to stay and wait.
***
Witches come and go, so does the saying confirm around here
on the outskirts to purgatory.
And in this
neighborhood, a number of covens have strung to life aligned with the dead who
are summoned at any whim of the living.
Gullible children join sects governed by shriveled up old
women; youngsters deranged by a variety of causes but always told that they are
spirit induced.
There are those castrated boys with botched circumcisions,
their bodies having turned on them, scarred and creased with lashing marks.
They often become staggeringly psychotic and end up in the
arms of self-proclaimed prophets and healers, pitiably violent and with crafty
schemes of their own.
Seeking a pure measure of compassion, to kindle and quench
furnaces of confusion enveloping their obscurity, these eunuchs would find
mother figures among wenches whose aims are to retard every reservoir of
innocence.
Boys would be inducted into thievery using totems and
artifacts left around unsuspecting victims.
I recall one boy speaking of a command to kill his entire
family in order to gain all the riches for which he yearned.
The vastness of need that could wring slovenly children like
these into weapons, leads many to suicide and others more deeply into darker
corridors of diabolical caverns.
Secret gatherings at midnight in townships such as Dunusa are their common excursions
undertaken ominously after dusk, and here hordes of initiates and master
witches sanction activities so calumnious that death dealt by their words is
more sacred than any scriptural fortitude.
Devil’s minions that wallowed the neighborhood into
perpetual debts by those who believed in mystery safes with currencies of any
wishing; they were getting rich but not their novices who undertook the
criminal exploits of wealth acquisitions.
These were some acrid smelling elderly leeches, ones with
rotten tomatoes pierced with rusted needles stashed under their beds, needled
rosy plums left with moss and dust threads of mould replicating these
lobotomized seekers of solace.
All these tomatoes representing souls of initiates, who
succumbed to temptation, can be auctioned among seasoned manipulators, at a
bargain.
Bloodshot and melodious symphonies pictured in the wake of
this army, what were they hiding?
Among the waded walks of cries by girls who let go, jokes of
an empire that expired through fiction created in computers, break into
happiness in bottles.
***
As fate would have it, the parable of the boy and the
witches begins with a chance meeting at a taxi stop, where an elderly woman
approaches a decrepit young oaf unloading sacks of junk yard collectibles he
sell at a bargain.
The woman informs him of her dream, in which he featured
drastically; a soul in lament, bewitched by his aunts who buried parcels of muthi under a tree they offered on some
Arbor Day.
He must visit her the following day she says, bidding the
puzzled man wondering if the truth exposed by this candid encounter could be
his saving grace.
It is always a wonder that, once under the spell of vain
desire one would see only their pain even when painted in colors of a million
lives.
The witch says he has been assailed by terrible nightmares,
made of colossal monsters at his rear bearing the image of his step-father.
This man has him as a mpundulu
sent by his paternal family to wreck havoc on the life of his mother and her
forsaken offspring.
Cruel undertakings and deeds the step-father has meted on
his younger sister are whispers muffled by revving engines and afternoon
chatter, naming an incestuous secret that would shatter his family.
The boy walks away from this dismayed encounter with a heavy
heart, intent of avenging his kin and reclaiming illusory wealth hidden under
spells of a step-father hell-bred.
On the appointed day of his visit, he is asked to strip
naked in clear view of two women in red and white drapes, hypnotized by humming
obscenities and hymns that rouse sorcery of the dark kind.
In a metallic tub filled with cold water mixed with pink then
yellow powder, wooden cuttings and bits of aloe, he is asked to bath his person
unleashing his skin from cloaks he inherited from his step-father’s inequities.
After this teeth-grinding experience comprised of fear and
rage and glacial freeze, he reclines upon a scarcely carpeted floor in abandon,
waiting for the slit guts of a white chicken to be sprinkled on his toes, legs,
loin, chest, neck, face and hair.
Smeared in caking blood and gore, he is covered with a
blanket over a boiling pot of bitter herbs, steamed thoroughly and dizzy, from
where he would emerge for yet a smoke sacrament over a burning plate crackling
with mpepho.
The boy would eventually be allowed to get into his trousers
and shirt, relief that he yearns for much lesser than the unveiling of his
fortune after a barrage of ritualistic disgraces.
Then the witch and her apprentice sit to tell tales of a
dismembered life, and laying blame on ancestral sins forgotten but not by the earth.
Ill wishes from loved ones are laid bare for him to see, he
believes this lie that is truth about families black.
His step-father was first to be found in an open grave,
after a week in the brittle cold of a bitter winter, slain on his way from a
binge and left bleeding in a hole agape among many waiting for funerals.
The boy and the witches devised many targets for their
acquisition of illusory wealth preached as the ultimate reward for darkest
work; they pricked tomatoes with needles and named their enemies by name in
curses.
But on the day of the discovery of the body, the
neighborhood craved blood.
Hordes of vigilantes went hunting witches and promising
stakes in forms of burning tyres, they gathered on dusty streets with brutal
rage and murder.
The boy was found hiding under shrubs growing not far from Masakeng, where herd boys thought him
mad and deranged and deserving of no shelter.
On that day his piss, vomit and blood streamed from an
assortment of orifices, and no under-god came to an alchemical rescue.
He cried with his mother also wailing from pains of a womb’s
fruit being slaughtered by angry mobs, when he eventually agreed to name and
shame his coven, leading heaving men and women, boys and girls on a mission of
cleansing.
Few know the whole tale, but it is said that many witches
were arrested but released soon after, with many police officers being clients
of this dark trade.
Dockets were lost, and the murderer sentenced to hefty
lengths of time to die a slave to prison wardens.
Lebelo recites
this somber tale in between gulps of a prison-cell concoction we have been
blistering our intestines with when Setlamatlama
returns from his mission for one infamous Dragon.
His exacerbation is written in the wrinkles drawn by the
cold air outside, leaving an ashy lip and graying skin hanging on a shivering
man seeking a sip of liquid fire.
And once with the last sip we lay the bottles on their sides,
we take leave after a stint of laughter about Setlamatlama’s love interest, who could very well be one among the
vile creatures scaling our shacks in the wee hours of night.
***
There is no bravery in watching stinging dreams drown into
fiery wells at gardens of hopelessness.
There is no hope in resting with clumsy replicas of faded
aims that lay rotting in minds’ secret chambers like treacherous money,
pollutant cars, whorehouse fashionable accessories and dry beverages.
When all seem unattainable, we all wallow in self-pity that
tells us that we are satisfied by the hunger of our claims.
Others beget strength, and others become vengeful; seeking
counsel of demons and darkness without the grace of love that is loyal to your
kin.
Brother maims brother, sister poisons sister; an earth
allowing for nothing good to survive in man.
And as I swerve into my street seeing Lebelo from a distance, I see how poverty bends the noblest will of
man, turns it into a suspicious craving that remains unquenched, if only by
blood.
The fleeting relief of inebriation calms with the dawning of
sour recollections and introspection, and the afternoon sun seems to make a
sham of earlier gusts.
Just as violent as the morning’s inclement weather was, the
afternoon sky crept scandalously blue above us cloaked in a purer light than
that which seemed hellish.
I, having allowed dominion of vagrancy to extol all strength
from me, am I not guilty of inglorious acts of self-neglect.
I have been swallowed by this perpetually suffocating stench
of frothing wishes, mine seeming too meager to voice to the gods who breathe
upon the mighty earth with its desolate children.
What honor would I have bestowed my careless final attempt
at changing my predicament?
Honor in love?
Honor in living not by the modesty of earthly desires but an
iron lust that will see me kill and steal?
Plumes of lost clouds gravitate towards the horizon as the
sun sets in a haze of orange, silvery violet lining on edges looking like
contours of men with grandiose gestures and power.
It is beautiful in the slum, children playing among
frolicking teens and dogs and goats.
This moribund hum of township life preparing for sleep
reminds me that we all live this horror without pride, but nevertheless live it
without shame.
Putrid smells of burning rags and tyres welcome dusk’s
mysteriously colorful entrance, and monotony of life drills its lethargic soup
into exhausted souls.
Glossy disguises of muses seeking better pastures and fatter
pockets will fade into pillows soaked with tears and perfumed sweat, while
masturbating men will be warmed by orgiastic visions of movie stars pinned to walls
of their prison shacks.
Tin drum fires will burn silhouetting vagrant boys lounging
at random corners, secrets will be loosened from their holds through boastful
harangues, and maybe an arrest will ensue in the bosom of this night.
A week will start again from the beginning, yet tonight I
will cozy under my flimsy blankets staring at the steel shack walls covered in
a tapestry of catalogue pages and magazine evangelism that speaks of my
inadequacy as fender for my stead.
This night will bring yet another torrent of missed moments
relived in lyrics of exorbitantly illiterate songs, blaring thorny tributes to
wealth that assault our glaring shame and calling us the conquered.
Dogs will wait for night watchmen and bark insults at
apprentices and novices delivering omens to unsuspecting sleepers, and the sky
will be darted with stars brightly streaming in an eternal ode to time’s leash.
I will dream another dream within this nightmare we call
living by virtue of its continued appearance on earth’s stage filled with
monsters and morons: I will dream a dream that will be false to any cunning and
wits, and me.
