On Dying

“There is no death! What seems so is transition;

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of The Life Elysian,

Whose portal we call Death” Longfellow.

Within the cloak-room of earth, flesh adorns a naked soul in a treacherous robe, a mantle of hypocrisy - twin bodies inaugurated in accord with their tomb.

A sweep of days in their uterine entombment blows like winds of time fleeting, with an unconscious tenderness, told through days of calamity; when birds of prey sharpened beaks by feasting on mass graves.

The soul, with whom death has claimed an enforced kinship, in his absence from the body, is but a shadow and a glowing bulb of flesh floating in a series of mirages in a well of life.

And if death has been swallowed up by life, let me ask you, my unknown but sorrowing friend, to lay with me for a while beside his tomb with our faces toward daybreak.

I know whereof I speak my friend - life is but a secret passage of impermanence and what lies beyond impermanence and death is but a crowning final boundless freedom.

Anyone who stares into the face of death could have a kind of confidence in lives meant to prepare for death.

We are but travelers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body.

These eloquent silences of the soul speak to the sympathetic listener with more inspiration than ecclesiastical utterances, telling of flesh’s crushed old affections, incredulous hopes, staggering commonsense love and of the afterlife so inexpressibly different to our expectations.

Know also the weakness as well as the yearning of the flesh to know that the things in the silence of death are true.

In the blackness of a mourner’s despair gropes the soul for the touch of a vanished hand, his ears strained for the sound of the voice that is still.

A Funeral And A Strange Death

A Funeral

When a hearse passes down your road you ought to sit down, squat or bend a knee as one wishes not to be in the sights of the angel of death riding a black limousine through a depraved township.

Another Friday of returning corpses to whom we must show respect, otherwise your mother’s breast will fall into the pot it is said.

This day, a somber procession cruises down this muddy street, where death knocked a couple of nights ago never to leave without a prized soul awaiting relief from chronic pain.

As every street has a matriarch, or a number of such love stricken women who seem to wear midwives’ uniforms on their deepest of hearts, the departed was one remembered by many as a woman who sewed.

Her remains now stuffed in a bulgy casket, one wonders of the mammoth task those who washed her body must have undertaken.

MmaSontaha mended clothes and souls, yes; all rags most of us inherited from white children through our mothers’ thieveries having went between Sis Dee’s nimble fingers for resizing.

A myriad church uniforms she also sewed, from decorous Wesleyan Red and Whites to AME penguin attires for stout women of worship; ZCC greens and gold, for all ages and creeds in the vast tapestry of African spirituality as expressed in various colors.

In my morbid recollections of how swift death is, came another life affirming realization which stood to confirm that without dying, no-one would have proof of having lived.

It is said that she had grown rather horrendously fat, never having left her house for nearly three years, but still paddling on her SINGER sewing machine till the wee hours of dawn while her obesity grew to suffocate all her veins.

When news spread the secret tragedy that befell a family without sustenance, among stokvels and burial societies entrusted with money from her frail hands, rumor had it that there was no certainty about who will carry the cost of the funeral.

Distant relatives and children who drifted to greener pastures were still to be contacted, but as norm has it, it was upon the women of this decrepit street to summon their wits for the rescue of this dire situation.

There were disheartening, dried screams and frozen tears shed by those who looked after MmaSontaha before she was hospitalized, and their tales were as defeated as their remembrance of her final breath taken at Sybrand hospital.

A strange collision of memories rises like rabbles of living things in my forgetting mind, and on this day, these women were patching her last dignity with loins and blankets, candles lit in secret rooms were her box was to wait until its decent into the horrid oblivion of earth.

Young women hurrying about with tear soaked eyes preparing tea for parasitic pastors in faded blazers and bulky bibles, we also thinking fondly about this woman who clothed their illegitimate infants and naked brothers.

And as new hopes and new despairs can never divert attention from such dramatic events as MmaSontaha’s death, and as no loss deserves lesser expressions of affliction, this event however saw many relieved that she was no longer in pain.

 Hymns were chanted in shadows, in rooms masking silent cries and agonizing heaves; and tents were being erected on the street while silent mourners began streaming towards the vigil.

Smugness and falseness of tongues that triumphantly wagged were perturbed when the relatives of the deceased arrived in hordes, through whose eyes no defeat could be deciphered.

They were rather a proud people, not fazed by the depravation they suffered under death’s merciless hand, their energy contaminating even those easily brought to tears by even a mere sight of an old photograph.

And I felt like man who wanted to discover the origins of decay, when flesh has swum over the precipice of longevity towards a rapid discarding of lustful memory.

Her age lost in birth records of stars, this shedding of flesh that once harvested light and a wade into darker ponds of soul is the mystery of our pious fears, and ever since childhood, I have imagined a different scenario either that that of blond angels and golden streets.

I beget that death is a gate we cross without invitation, a time of no longer looking towards the sun, a seeming end to the existence of exactness and realness.

And yes, physical pain can be a chronic insult to the body and to empathize with the aggrieved, now I could understand their talk about having contemplated euthanasia as a final gift to their mother.

As is normal in this small township, traces of common ancestry linger among generations who never left for other opportune lands and you could hear many speaking about connections and matrimonial allegiances to the deceased, others even uttering scolding remarks about incestuous boys who impregnate their nieces.

 After sweltering cries to heaven spewed by a preacher with a tongue loosened by pain and fear, close relatives begin speaking in memoriam of this lady who helped many mothers build their first shacks when men were stolen for labor camps.

Gossip mongers hardly dampened the conviction of her children to give their mother a memorable funeral, and by the hour of the vigil’s dispersal many a folk from around the township were sharing fond memories brewed in delirium after loss.

Listening with mounting excitement to their stories, while standing among idle young men who offered the elderly seats, I realize how even the scepter of death could never crush the ever blossoming courage of downtrodden people, these poor black debris of freedom’s orphanage.

The troubled calm among listeners to a souring prayer made me realize how death also serves to make the divine seem plausible, for even the most ardent of atheists dozed under shut lids while a litany was hailed heavenward by a pastor drunk on faith.

His faith that he could pray for the deceased and resurrect her was an inexcusable insult, but the congregants conceded to remembering in fondness MmaSontaha’s pride and demeanor even during the most trying of times.

Before many left, a throng of women clad in shoals and blankets queue towards the room where the deceased rests guarded by her kin.

Brave women, who would huddle through the gnashing silence that will fill the room only disturbed by sobs of the night, drenched in thoughts of words hardly spoken to her when she was still alive.

With the unknowability of the after-life making it a perfect destination for those who see death as transition from a thorny world to the next, I pondered the last moments of a person suffocating, strangled by their own clotting blood in arteries and varicose veins.

Perhaps in their immense pain a euphoric serum is spread across their poisoned bodies, sedating all edge and nerve shattering collapse of internal organs and brains deranging themselves.

But I can never be certain because only death is witness to his own deeds and aftermaths thereof, and only in death would I know what dying feels like.

Does my accepting the act of dying with gleeful abandon ascertain my surrender to death?

Death; that elixir for those entering shadowy gates of heaven – an intoxicating pinch that awaken us from a phantom slumber in the warm holds of flesh.

Death; a starry eye leading souls through caves of resolute memory, frozen memories about themselves and others - a torch shedding mirages of un-chosen and unlived moments in time.

And when age does not become me, would death be a better absolution with all illusory safety of the body dissolving into space dust yet inevitably, tomorrow will be Saturn’s day and the hearse will loll down the sloppy road towards an ignoble cemetery.

Sermons will be recited by hearty pirates of scriptures, and last tears will fall on clumps of soil strewn by weary hands on the defeated MmaSontaha.

Prayers will monitor the soul’s rise towards new lands and in no time, when all have forgotten the brute nurture of death, township life will skip on hot coals of uncertainty with a reasonable melancholy that makes all fear graveyards just a little more intimately.

***

Gusts of impatient winds roar through dried streets on this dusty day and blobbing tents shaking on their pillars welcome congregant mourners in best black shades of funeral suits and dresses.

Attires sewn by her hand adorn worshiping ladies who own every Thursday, who on this day will pay their tribute to the seamstress of the clergy.

Priests struggle out of rackety vans with gagutum gowns clumped uneasily at the waist, bibles and verses for servicing death readied by pamphlets sold every Sunday during tenths’ collection time.

I will however not make the journey to gravesite as is our custom as men of our homestead, but my respects will be tailing the humming throng pacing behind a dark limousine towards the mud gates of heaven carved in the earth.

As a child, I attended numerous funerals, my grand-father’s included; and yet there still lingers some sour memories of that death which impacted my disdain for such displays of fictitious affection.

From an early age I was aware of hypocrisies that mar such events, with even the worst of enemies allowed a day of watching and ogling the defeated laying in a plywood coffin.

Concealed delights and mocking sympathies from siblings of the deceased told behind mobile lavatories or among sizzling pots and rancid smoke; we can all relate to such galleries of inner monstrosities that are laid bare during funerals.

But as an innocent child who felt robbed by mysterious carriers of loved ones towards stingy angels and devils, I realized how just as man never appreciates one in life, the pretense of appreciating a man in his death is a cunning slander.

It later occurred that in maturity when I asked some of my relatives to take me to my grandfather’s grave, not one of them could remember beside the old man who was herding nearby, who once knew grandfather and was in attendance on that fateful day.

It was to this incendiary memory that I believed that those who bury their dead do so out of a mere obstinate compulsion and opportunistic revenge for their untold malice; and as this crowd follows a corpse to Neverland, I wonder who are harboring sinister smiles beneath pious tears.

 And as the throng slinks past the corner house, as slight calm engulfs everything, children have stood up to hide from the hush that surrounds infinitesimal space left by the many souls who attended the funeral.

For as her life occurred as a spot in the one wide daub of existence, she was now on her sacred chariots towards continents in the sky, I hope.

And if there be life in the unseeable, then envying the dead is truly a pardonable appreciation of the doddering expanses of their unending journey and a glimpse at the secret of immortality.

A Strange Death

Among those whom wisdom distinguished from the common people, was one young man who grew to become a dexterous blacksmith and immaculate welder.

After years working as a boiler maker in one of the exploitative firms of rural Losberg, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Surgeries removed the rotten lung and doctors prescribed medication which proved toxic over the duration of his rations.

And one Saturday, as a hearse was departing for the gravesite carrying his deceased neighbor, he became very sick and an ambulance was called in the heart of a boiling summer’s day by his panic-stricken wife to take him for observation at a nearby hospital.

When people returned from the cemetery to dismaying news of the sudden emergency, many started mumbling about witchcraft, about how death always strikes twice and seldom thrice, where one death is like an ordinary shower that eventually becomes a cloudburst of misery.

Exhausted priests were summoned to say prayers for the sick, and while others queued for overcooked vegetables, interceding pleas were wailed and the departed beckoned to rebuke death’s hand reaching too close to home.

Cheap prophets squirmed into prestige and emolument by lazy worshippers also joined the prayer campaign, earnest and devoted falsifiers of truth with their sensitive prejudices, disregarding the gravity of the funeral rites over which they have just presided.

By late Sunday afternoon, reports came from the house of the disease stricken that he had committed suicide by jumping from the 7^th floor and falling on water geysers of the hospital.

The shock caused by the news made me wonder why such a death should be of lesser repute among black people, and after being buried for moments in profound meditation I realized that death by own volition is a concern mainly for those pent on descendents and bloodlines.

I could speculate about reasons for his suicide, but those would be mere assumptions without merit or proof.

But it is said that upon being given intravenous medication he went utterly berserk, and his collapsing vestiges of sanity rent through his body a dual persona, poles in conflict, which the jumper won.

To imagine how suicide holds a spectacular status among taboos of our superstitious folk, first as it dishonors the travails of one’s mother, then castrating progenitors of each bloodline and engendering a genetic mutiny, I could only think of his young wife’s dismay.

A glint lingers in The Kid’s eyes, as tells me the news and my hair stands on end as I began to wonder if this parable of three consecutive deaths on one streets meant some ferocious peril for me.

This man was a friend to every soul on this street, greeted every elder with a concern of a devout monk, and also spilt prophesies of bright futures to many a derelict youth who had lost hope to binges and cheap drugs.

And as with all that lose their supposed god through such untested misfortunes, I found it difficult to reconcile suicide as a brave act even though I doubted the existence of divine witnesses.

That there is a mortal resistance to everything unpreventable, that the sole cause of most profound pain is the negation of the evident, is a small truth I came to hold as dear and sacramental.

***

Then it occurs to me that like automatons led by a cloud of misinformation by day and a pillar of frightened prayers by night, mankind now seems in a frenzy of someone who yearns to stop death.

I wondered if our resistances would dissipate voluntarily in the face of a proven fact of death in the face of all oppressive dogmas assaulting our cosmic pilgrimage.

But I was left to disbelieve such a possibility, as I am afraid humanity will not acknowledge death as that which should be their primary pre-occupation in life.

Man will continue to invent phantasms that negate scientific logic and facts regarding death experiences, while meta-scientific truths about the existence of souls, no matter how un-divine, will be relegated to the realm of neo-mystical myths.

All internal distances of the soul’s journey prior and during its tenure in flesh, if viewed as sedimentary layers which have fossilized the most rigid substance of the soul’s memories, can be deciphered once one has exited the plane of the flesh.

And if dreams can be more than just wisps of the super-real experiences of the soul, why can’t the soul therefore be a protagonist more suited for climates of the dreamscape?

All illusionary vainglories of common suppositions about the soul’s immortality and its eternal bondage to a divine god can be faulted, because I would even argue that there is but a single soul that perpetually reincarnates itself through billions of species living on this planet.

Death may be admired as a vehicle to the after-life but it is not a trustworthy one as it is continually providing souls with new openings and closings to life’s various levels, and forcing oneself through one gate to the after-life does not mean cowardice or abandonment of orderly lore.

The remotest regions of the soul could possibly lie in those gulfs between living in flesh and living beyond flesh, or in those moments of death, where one is finally able to perceive their soul’s likeness which would be euphorically overwhelming.

But how sad, that the allegorical personage most responsible for the success of all spiritual religions – the soul, is shown the least amount of charity and the most consistent abuse by those who most unctuously preach the rules of altruism.

If the soul does not acquire stringent discipline through self-flagellation or fasting, it is suggested that that soul will dissipate and or lose its inner infernal purity, but I disagree.

I believe all experience, no matter how grueling or pleasurable, is capable of imparting great knowledge to a soul on a journey of self-discover.

I believe that if a soul becomes inextricably engaged in a brutally frank talk with itself about the repression of its humanity's carnal nature, all phony pretenses at piety in the course of an existence based on dog-eat-dog material pursuits would fall by the wayside.

Should we then think of the soul as an organism that needs no base, a gleam that will shatter, that needs nothing of finality?

When all unmannerly derisions of religion are hushed could we recapture man's mind and carnal desires as objects of celebration by a soul departed?

Should the soul be preoccupied with flattering one little god, or exhort his hearers to forsake their altars upon which had burned unheeded lights?

The soul is inextricably bound up with all the other aspects of being, among its many other transcendental functions, and should therefore aim at triumph over awful odds against the flesh.

A soul foaming with new expressions is only free once the coils of his little moral horizons relax their constrictions, and only then can he redesign all fruits of life’s unexpected oases into miracles, incredibilities of lives and of sanctified thoughts.

Dogmas that have solidified out of the vaporings of poisoned minds will henceforth never drag the soul under currents of intransigence.

And with regards to suicide, the sharpened horns of this dilemma, will the deceased be punished by militant angels with a darkness of night and a blackness of the unborn?

Or will they be celebrated as those who dared practice death while anticipating its untimely arrival?

***

As I stand now glaring at crowds and their unfocused priesthoods gathering for Friday evening vigil, choral cliques clap rhythms of praise while large automobiles cram the street jostling little children from their sunset games.

So enthralled are the women with head wraps and shawls around their waists, all momentarily devoid of sanctimonious platitudes as suicide warranted no sympathy.

The Kid and I had stood by as preparations were made to receive the corpse and the family was so overawed they hardly dared look into his face and most ran outside sobbing inconsolably, that I could only imagine what they had laid eyes upon.

Prayers were coughed up banishing infernal demons and wrong angels and profound feeling was aroused in me, who was contemplating his own mortality on a mirror of death.

The yard was saturated with an intense awareness of death, and later I wondered what specific preparations I should make for guiding my dying.

It is yet another dubiously chaotic day in Kokosi, with everyone else strangling their weary struts on dust for their rendezvous with cologne drenched mates and possible husbands to bury.

Teenage girls were flaunting their summer wear under a sky glistening with stars and flights to distant lands, thighs glossed in slim sweat paraded before mourners whose eyes could not be diverted from their sorrow.

Mumbling mother hissed their disgust and holy words slouched over diced vegetable and unkempt peels, while men sat in sour silences, eyes gasping for breath of young air fanning the night with virginal perfumes.

Fire crackers rang from another street and sky glittered in motley sacrilege while stereos continued their duels for airwaves in a nauseating cacophony of deliberately kitsch festive hits.

 The dead was to be buried in the morrow still, and life would collapse into its dreary dream and illusory factions of the living dead, and raucous debauchery was the order of yet another December’s evening in a place where rosters of the dead circulate through church meetings.

As the hymns begin solemnly under a red and white tent illuminated by a dizzy bulb crowded by moths and other insects, I slink back into my reverie and awe, clarity slowly gripping my gut, and absence of thoughts, linked inextricably with each other in one taste of rot.

On Freedom’s Death Date

Gusts and whistles from the past

Moan inexhaustibly as

Timorous souls rub hands pityingly on a colossal sin.

Tranquilly avenging freedom’s failures,

Hidden men drum miracles on tin roofs

And bundles of faults granted charm.

Escorted on excursions with gods and

Vague women in an anxious country of assassins,

Secret friends and keen bandits are fishing for final pearls.

The Ceremony

For My Family

It is Friday, and noon is scotching moisture out of slightly drenched soil, little children running backwards in games of cops and robbers.

I wait under a shrubby tree that has grown with me at this place I call home; a van full of sheep will soon drive by on its common errand appropriate for selling animals for weekend.

A blessed prelude is provided by my grand-mother’s arrival, my mother’s aunt Mantombi , a startling split image of Nobuthi, my maternal grandmother.

Then I know she is at the helm of a band of ancestors who sailed the underworld to secure their seats at this feast in their honor with a bride to bind as vessel of their progeny.

The van blasts a horn while we are dazed by nostalgic greetings and moments of recollecting faces after years of an absence, and I lead the congress of elders to select the anointed lamb.

Once the drama of a boy riding this taciturn ewe and scaring small children into midday migraines subsides, the animal is harnessed against a stump of an amputated peach tree behind my shack.

I ask the elderly uncle next door to come help me slaughter, tomorrow marks the much anticipated ceremony of welcoming our bride into a bloodline of griots.

Mother and I say words to calm the frantic creature, ritual custom dictating we speak to ancestors to ask for guidance and blessing.

Seeing not its near future as its blood will spill into a hole dug behind our house, we have appeased its soul to accept a fate that will clear paths of my brother’s matrimony.

We ought to slaughter before souls of other animals slain for funerals go under any blade, mother says; and the rope is loosened around a neck at peace with death.

 At around three in the blazing noon clime auguring rain during the later hours of the day, Malome and I lay the meek sacrifice on its right side, head facing west and he slices through fur, skin and bone in less than half a minute.

Knives claw through skin and chest bones are spread by cracks, and a swift exercise of skinning before flesh cools follows.

Blood soaks the earth and fills the hole, a smell quite alchemic and rejuvenating and in less than ten minutes the animal is naked and hanging from a branch, a wire twisted between severed ligaments.

Elderly women of my street gather in convoys towards our gate, knives sharpened and ready for peeling vegetables while a fire starts under a hanging carcass dripping its last blood into a hole filed with its guts and cud.

This cult of women begin cleaning tripe, intestines and men burn sections of the meat on coals sizzling in a gentle draft that prophesizes rain and tables are laid out with greens and yellows.

Meats diced and marinated, red supple tomatoes and potatoes among other assortments from harvests by machines dance on tabletops among dexterous hands and crazy spices.

Chopping maniacally and in harmony, these ladies who reared me and my siblings hum hymns and chat about old days of binging on Lion Lager, smoking pot and being chased by gangs of mineworkers marauding rocky hills around Leeupoort.

Uncle and I reminisce about my grandfather, his uncle; wondering about their unkempt graves and lamenting losses of other family members to untimely deaths.

Memories born sweetly like a yoke which can be a pillar of strength for those left among the living, and we marvel and laugh, my sisters arriving with my nephew and nice already entranced by township vibes and lust for sunset games.

And soon after chewing smoked meat cut with knives sharpened by experienced men, black pots are set upon coals and stews begin to simmer as darkness falls purpling over a company of loved ones.

There is Makhulu Meisie, a stunningly old and toothless woman who has been our neighbor for well over 25 years. She raised us, mother included with a calm exchange of love even when food was not there.

I recall playing with her daughter, during the madrigals of adolescence, chasing hopes and other gifts of acquaintances.

I watch her with her two grandchildren, born of her deceased daughter, cuddly and thumb sucking with an eye transfixed on the slaughtering ritual like a hypnotized gnome.

There is Ausie Matokelo, her cake and dumpling recopies intact in her soft-spoken heart.

An admirable soul who ventures into all occasions with a stroke of dizzying excitement, always encouraging my mischief with pieces of meats passed between us in secret.

uKhulu is a matriarch twin on a throne adorned by mother, her right-hand confidant and soul mate; a lady who reared us since time immemorial.

More hands arrive to help with preparations that will go on through the night, with guffaws and discharges of gossip melting into dreams of exhausted children lying on my bed.

And as I sit beside dying fire and steamy pots, smoke biting my eyes as I watch the sky darkening, lightning streaks in the east announcing an approaching storm.

And when midnight strikes, even the loudest jests are subdued by weary chests and aching arms of their zealous toil – my sisters and mothers who ordain miracles even to the undeserving.

The day begins in the belly of a night serenaded by a drizzle, a grandmother snoring tempestuously in her room and mother listening to radio sermons by insomniac preachers who read obituaries at hours of the rising dead.

***

At dawn of a sacred day breathing freshly watered scents as early as four am, mother is mumbling her prayers to some heaven where grandmother is said to have gone.

The house awakens to her sweeping the yard and emptying night pots;  I am soon fixing broken handles of massive pots, chopping wood with an axe made for ogres while buckets of water line the kitchen floors.

Then a new idea is dredged out that the shack outback should be dismantled to make a suitable caterers’ space and I am asked to break down a 25 year old shack in a matter of minutes in the wee hours of a gloriously tiresome day that approaches.

Contagiously charming giggles soar above voices awakening to duties of love and the ding of hammers on rusted steel sheets, bent nails screeching from termite infested poles.

Sauces glisten in black pots standing on gold black blue flames dancing to whizzing logs and candle wax, we are now waiting and preparing for welcoming a bride is an omen for the wedded, the living and the dead similarly.

Hired chairs and tables are unloaded from a wrinkly truck driven by ecstatic teens, tents stand erect on skew poles and décor breaks into song for sight while mother’s nerves strain on edge with anticipation.

Three old men in faded jackets stumble on their slow strides into the yard to kiss the calabash full of mqhombothi, and among the jovial acknowledgements of visits, Zulu waltzes in looking stranded and forlornly abandoned by those who died leaving him behind.

Always in a green overall top, he is ever humbled by any generous reception which still recognizes humanity in him, a plate of food to oil his stomach before he can kneel before the circle of elders met with a faithful hunger.

An anciently elegant ritual takes place as I welcome all to the homestead of Bafokeng, raised by Amaqwathi and in other references we spill a sip for the deceased and continue to drink and be merry as hours draw near to the hour awaited.

Saddest awareness is when I see my great-aunt Mathebula not entering our yard because of a squabble that I am oblivious to, and this leaves a sour taste in my mouth; for these spoils are her victory as well as inheritance of grandchildren to bear her hallowed name.

We share words in the short moments we walk together, and observing how vile secrets harbored by parents can taint the sanctity of life affirming events, I resolve to have my family meet in a resolutionary encounter where souls would be laid bare.

***

Sky stains ashy and darkly in a ferment of her own for this occasion.

Banks of black clouds crowded over our township, and as one would assume, right above our home where women where running amok like deranged ants on a crusade to save reserves for winter.

Storm clouds amassed with a diabolical zeal bordering on mania, its appetite for destruction seeming akin a symptom of witchcraft meant to destroy the joys of to-day.

A drizzle begins to ransack rooftops, and soon pelting hail is assaulting heads and shoulders slouched in toil for a ceremony to document a lady’s sacred arrival at our yard.

As is customary, when the bride’s family takes their time arriving at the homestead of the groom, they have to be penalized.

And that was most hilarious, watching clan share ancient apologies in poetic tapestries of tongues of the two who chose to share a bone.

While rays danced in arches around edges of sulky clouds, my grand-mother Mantombi was rearing a shoe to cast a spell to stop the downpour.

This ritual is ancient as old wives’ tales such as boiling mud in a metal kettle over coals where food is prepared for such a celebration.

And in no time, the clouds had boarded the currents of air that led the stormy clouds of earlier morning, and a wild summer’s warmth spreads over dusty streets, men and women coming into our yard decorated with impeccable taste.

I sit on plank momentarily to tend to queries of old men uncertain about my age, while running errands, moving pots from hearths, and axing bones of stubborn meat that was to fit into fat pots.

The marvel of it all, knowing that such occasion summon introspection; with histories entwined and overlapping in chatter and guffaws, while old grudges are set aside for later dates.

MaDipuo sits among the quest exquisitely clad in her finest; a memory flashes in my mind of her earlier years, a playful soul who enjoyed nothing more than popping my pimples.

New family meets old news and passions among my scintillating sisters who always make their wardrobe a statement for red carpets, and yes the red dust agreed with their color-blocked emboldened images.

Mother, looking divine among noble guests, smiles and cries during moments of a most endearing talk with Makoti, accepting her into this destiny with those who will embrace her destiny as their own.

Laying warning and lessons for life to my brother, I feel humbled to be among these souls in unison of life’s charitable experience.

How sacred matrimony is, I realized, when not only two start a journey, but a throng that vows to walk alongside the couple throughout eternity’s paths.

Another Early Morning At Wanderers Taxi Rank

Baggy pants and a decade old t-shirt from an anti-globalization campaign; a mess of hair, Chuck Taylor feet waltzing an intersection at dawn.

My angel dons some Hello Kitty costume, looks like a catalogue and feels divine, enthused by the prospects of travel which is every child’s secret addiction.

Head is bobbing to rhythms of hooters and synthesizers from random stereos, ear sealed by thought yet alert to pulsating life around this traffic jam.

Bodies hurriedly coax pathways among vegetables and fried meats, skeletons of flesh donors scattered at mouths of clogged drains.

A whistle here, a clamor of chatter and sales talk, crowds of vendors around windows of ramshackle taxis and sleep assailing nightshift workers with sweat smell and halitosis.

Perfumes from alleys or lost shelves in glass markets and migrant shopping malls, it is yet another dawn among late streetlights still glowing at this rush-hour.

Another morning at Wanderers Taxi rank, trolley pushers yawning clouds of cheap gin, heaps of luggage paraded among nervous commuters and the commonly annoyed ones. 

Impromptu calls from queue marshals about destination too far to comprehend vie for space, broken boards with faded signs exclaiming names of places where others are to be buried.

Mess of bodies still clad in dreams waking from railway tracks and makeshift shelters under bridges named after colonial masters.

Muddled wishes and ancient stories riddled in homeless young faces, well dressed mannequins and uniformed guards wielding handcuffs and other cold steel.

Spit contests, smoking mouths and hoarse narratives among road travelers and the constantly staring eyes of passengers packed in metal coffins that mirror our transience.

My daughter in tow, a heavy bag full of toys crushing my shoulder blades and her slim hand soothing in my grasp, her daze and wonder making strides slower than the motion, we are also lost as seeds among tall monuments standing on granite earth.

After swindling our way through rows of pavement boutiques and sizzling coals, we board a taxi to our destination, Kokosi.

It is still missing seven people, and this means another two hour wait in the blizzards of a Joburg summer is metal cage with windows welcoming inexhaustible chatter and deals.

One lady with an irritable child is being molested by dirty salesmen with dodgy toys and sugar supplements, and the child starts prying for one of the nooses dangled before him.

“Atle alle fela ngoana o, otla mothudisa hobane nna ha kena chelete.” She tells the lout to outright leave her child to his lack of throwaway playmates and diseased delicacies.

An unceasing stream of vendors assails this wreck from all sides, harassing passengers with all types of expressive endearments.

Stale fruit, soggy sandwiches and boiled eggs pitched on sweaty shoulders or sooty head-wraps, garbage piles growing faster than a mime’s pose.

And yet a vendor’s zest never flounders, even when they’ve become jokes for forlornly bored travelers on yet another coffin on wheels.

There’s the belts and facecloths salesman, with a portfolio of combs, toothbrushes and hairpins in tow, he tickles a snort-nosed urchin crawling on a single knee, its mother seated at a peanut stall.

The one carrying a single box of ‘expensive’ perfume, always asking prospective clients how much they can afford; the one with three gold chains always exposed way below the waistline for open observation.

Not far away, more wanton people crisscross each other’s footsteps pacing towards various ends of this anthill city, bags are drawn or carried, hands exchanging coins for bottled water or poisoned energy drinks.

Disused policemen saunter through this human mess like masters of a board game, wrestling machismo handshakes with drowsy taxi owners playing draft seated on rusty tin drums.

My daughter is perplexed by these theatrics I can tell, because she is glued to the conversation happening between two women in the taxi, about how much hair costs and on which street to find designer labels for fake products.

Slim passages between taxis make any movement precarious, vehicles packed like loaves of steel bread in a crate made of concrete, but I dare venture to find a spot to light a cigarette and smoke, concealed from roach vultures who always ask for a last drag.

An eye peeled on my daughter sketching figures on a sordid window steamed with her breath, I am getting restless but soon I am called in as the last farers arrive in time to relieve me from bile frothing in my gut.

After an olfactory overdose of rotten armpit odors and sour drains, sweat drenched shirts unbeaten by nicotine stench closest to my nose; I venture inside to sit next to my tired child, searching for notes to pay while she fumbles for a position comfortable for sleep.

Some woman commends her plaited hair and beauty, I smile, and soon the hum of the engine steers out of this case on stilts, a sign that we are headed out of this vile machine city.

Skyscrapers hover over parades of departures and arrivals, while lost patients from its womb’s sanitarium still walk trapped in its blinding mazes. 

Three First Borns

S’cefe

On his 28^th birthday, Scefe’s bowlegged father bludgeoned him to a pulp for calling his mother a witch.

A terror to innocent gazes of women and children; having bled innumerable times in knife duels and gang attacks, he’s his father’s monstrosity tamed by sticks and steel pipes.

First born among six, he is son to a loud-hailing street evangelist, a staunch moralist who has baptized half the youth of this township.

His children are meant to lead by pious example, by being teachers’ pets in class and aspiring for aviation vocations acquired through military service.

A scar-riddled head, ever clean shaven for hair to never grow in unsavory patches that make him resemble a leper, he is now a formidable drunk among his peers.

Most are always on the receiving end of his avalanches of careless punches toned by mine-dump gravel shoveling and municipal bucket lavatory disposals.   

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Kissed too many a pavement in his short life, bearing a testament of vacant gums, a bruise he bears with every smile – an image cultivated in tortures.

Growing up among five sisters made him a protective ogre rumored as castrated among young initiates vying for his born-again house of sorority.

Yet S’cefe lost his cards in a game of breaking virginities, now an uncle to three nephews and a niece, bastards he curses every night of his brute rage after gurgling on backyard brews and left-over beer spittle.

Once engaged to a teenage fling and badly let off a leash for a pot-bellied mine supervisor, he has ever since loathed mines and any prospect of working there for love’s sake.

A type of irreconcilable grudge with whoever is a beneficiary of steamy shifts in sordid shafts dug once by forefathers who lived a legacy of tuberculosis and radiation poisoning, a worthy baton left for their young.

‘Lamagoduka aziz’cefe.’ S’cefe would say in clear view of sweaty men stewing in hard liquor, tortured by blue balls and a lust for young thighs, lost away from their slovenly wives stuck in aimless homelands and squatter camps.

On his 32^nd birthday, S’cefe and his three friends hijacked a beverage delivery truck, drove it through ogling squatter camp louts, in search of gullible customers and loose girls to impress.

To dispose of their merchandise, soft drink cargo sold like peanuts to adrenalin flushed school children and greedy tuck-shop owners who negotiated ridiculous bargains and stocked crates for the festive season.

But word got around through tracker devices and other monitors spying from fruit stalls and dingy hair salons that S’cefe is ghetto Santa and he came to town early.

The culprits were sourly paying for debts buried with uncles, snitched by vengeful women impregnated on one night stands or high school bonking parties organized by heirs to impounded taxi fleets.

And when news reached his father’s holy ears, hell walked on two crooked legs wielding a sjambok and machete handed down from times of hostel massacres and peerless riots, a deadly messiah pent on flagellating a heathen.

He dealt a wanton medley of blows on S’cefe’s dyslexic brain, hoarse tongued and doing the police a favor, he claimed.

Nobody disciplines his flock – that was his mantra when S’cefe’s mother intervened shielding her strange fruit that fell first from her tired branches.

Convulsing in tears and pleading to no avail, paraded before enemy and foe, S’cefe was thus disgraced by his father, among hooligans of a township that dreaded the buffoonish sight of him.

That was three years ago, before he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, before his headaches needed more than marijuana, before his rage could make him talk to himself in broad daylight.

Before bilious monologues directed at his cursed father became his uncensored script; before slurs unto his haggard sisters prostituting themselves in the same tavern that staged spoils of his soul became his mantra.

These infernal tirades became customized offences ever since, among other innocent mishaps like exposing his giant limp penis before children playing in mud and garbage piles, or burning paraffin at a tuck-shop that supposedly owed him small change.

These headaches sapped his brain of dignity and decorum, on his face left only twitches and a feature-less gaze filled with inner struggle and desertion.

And when the sun tilted one October afternoon over a rusty backyard hangout, being known as a staunch supporter of a skull and bones soccer team, he dared make a comment about some golden team player’s lack of skill and something flared up.

Okapi’s swung from fluid hands that knew anatomy, plunging and plucking, carving slits on supine arms and legs staggering over metals rails of security gates crowded by onlookers.

The brutal news of his death travelled rampantly from tavern to township folk, tears swelling in eyes of the sympathetic, and joy blinding his victims to the cruelty of his death by the hand of a mob of soccer fanatics.

Last moments of slipping breath, neither defiant nor clawing for life, he is said to have died contented with aims tossed aside at this end of another first born in a wasteland of constant births.

London

He was christened London by his father, slept in a partition behind a make shift kitchenette of a shack once located in the liquidated camp named Riverside.

Alone on his mattress until he was seven when Elizabeth who was six joined him in the kitchen hideout, they were inseparable, but only during school as they were in different classes.

A bright eyed child who played alone with gadgets of his making, he also became known as Madopa, a hoarder of junk magazines and obsolete encyclopedia discarded by the well-read.

After his pantsula father died in a rock fall in one of the mines, London, his sister and mother lived a life considered forfeit, disguised in shabby eccentricity and dreams of a former beauty-queen who once dated a sought after bachelor.

Moving from one settlement to another, among stints of boarding in backyards, they were eventually allocated a stand to build their shack.

Tending to a sickly mother and hungry sister, London carved a home for his loved ones and resolved to never be distracted by need nor fall into trappings of quick fixes.

Piously respectful, a tickler of infants along his every path, yet slightly afraid of dogs who he suspected of being ever rabid, he was a model burned by his mother’s failed dreams of affluence.

But when most people fail in their aims they blame the devil and witchcraft, and Zion Christian Church becomes a haven for most, together with the dying young begging for prayers to postpone their dates with the ripper.

The duo had become avid stompers since time immemorial, iconic in exhibition of spiritual fervor that often galvanized other congregants to heights of exhilaration from healing songs.

They were called ‘the anointed’ by many, and were zealous interceders, attending services in tempest or cold blizzards to ration blessings for the elderly.

On their way to church one Sunday, burying a surging excitement of children wearing humorless grins anticipating hymns and chants, they were hit by a taxi swerving on slippery potholes swelling with dirty water after a hail storm.

Avoiding splashes of filth from falling on their church green and gold uniforms made their strut through the street a bit discordant.

Lacking attention for nothing either than the mud they neglected to observe other concerns, and only screams from horrified mothers who anticipated unfortunate events to unfold, made them look about in a terror that stupefied their sense, and as he tells the story, they both froze.

How he forever recalls that sweetly curious being whose company he loved to walk through muddy summer days of Modderfontein, her lucid mind that always questioned and possibly made him as driven to inquiry and observation.

He lost his arm and she her life rolled up in bloody mingled wet soil, mud caked to their heads, hers still as a rock while he wailed at his dismembered arm to crawl back in place.

If fighters live to die so the innocent may survive, then he was no soldier on that day, but a scared fourteen year old writhing in the grip of ripped flesh and bone.

After long stints in hospitals and a barrage of insults from rowdy oafs, he reconciled to carry his life single-handedly with a new vigor.

London Madopa became an itinerant seller of assorted delicacies like magwinya and éclairs, a functionary who oiled his mother’s creaky wheels, for she was aging not too gracefully after years of debauchery, binge diets and a bad heart.

Broken radios, kettles and small appliances were his prized collections those high school days spend ripping the trivial and expendable trifles and reassembling them for a meager fee.

He never passed a discarded battery-cell, having shown us many experiments where we exploded these devices.

I recall that once black goo escaped after long periods in the colas, we filled the smudge in tin-cans to later remodel them into weird sculptures and toys for young ones.

After matriculation, it was no surprise that he went on to study physics at Potchefstroom University, and travelled many countries as a young prodigy for scientific minds languishing among us who are of unfortunate births.

Now 34, waving a stunted arm at my camera at his wedding celebration, I recall that I got acquainted to London Madopa in Primary School, a sporty soul who was always whistling a hymnal melody.

Left-handed genius with a penchant for Archie Shepp found buried in his late father’s records, he developed a vision beyond poverty’s wars by which he was assailed, and that vision became a light that guided his escape from the township prison.

He soared above depravity, carried by winds of jazz storms that inaugurated stars to his naked eyes, now he is an astrophysicist, envied by many inevitably uncultured and irredeemable children of the township who see him as a snob.

He was his mother’s pride, a colossal feat for a single woman tending to mean means, at trials with life’s tribulations and constant rules which work against any attempt by the frail.

Just as she carried herself with that air of self-assured importance, looking at others with superior answers for their inexperience and feebly secure arrangements of small town life, he grew to look undefeated.

And today, he defeats the stars, constellations and galaxies with an eye bred in dusty streets of a place known for killing dreamers.

Nnana

Her younger brother Pampangtjie was arrested for possessing a pistol in 2008; a boy of 16, just a couple of days after her 22nd second birthday, wielding it at his mates in drunken stupor.

On his return from stoutskool, he couldn’t keep out trouble, as political rallies for manifestos by new parties in a democracy made of glass became his favorite past-time.

He has been a member of three political parties, while Nnana has never even voted; a revolutionary spirit filled with commercialized hopes inherited from dead stalwarts.

Promised lucrative posts as councilors and commanders, many who stuffed armored boxes with crossed ballots learnt deceit of political charlatans through ordered massacres of women begging for water and clinics.

When he turned 28, he had paid with his leg for sloganeering during some botched service delivery protestations that rendered him paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.

She tends to his crushed body now, a swollen leg bulging with pussy stews that ooze copiously, scabs rotten with skin that dries smeared with expired salves and bandages flaking off disgustingly.

16 rubber bullets can crack ribcages irreparably, making breathing a noisy feat; but Nnana has developed a patient empathy that resembles a mother’s courage for her despondent brother.

She is all he has and all she has in a world where being an orphan is commonplace, a light burns in their RDP house flickering testaments that life draws its strength from all souls.

She enjoys his company hugely, his chatter and pontifications about workers’ rights and capitalist gallows piled with black fathers and sons.

Pampangtjie was well versed in struggle polemics, having spent his time seated among books bought in thrift shops and pawn garages before dropping out of university.

A weary voice that nevertheless spoke ceaselessly, he kept Nnana’s eyes fixed on her dream of starting a salon, in a township where there was an oversupply of hairstyles in shebeens.

Nnana however, had her fun as stokvel mistress, together with friends from Toekomsrus, travelling west rand mine dumps in search of golden opportunities at marriage or other tactical careers.

After stints of bagging real cash from beer sales at hostels, their stokvel grew in strength, organizing trips to coastal cities during holidays and attracting men vying for made women.

Big spenders in flashy cars bought on credit proposed marriage on many occasions, for men seemed to fall in love with her on first night acquaintances – spellbound by a charcoal black skin glistening with beauty that haunts.

And she fell for a biker - a rush after a foxy target that was in every hunter’s sights.

Polished lies of a sleuth made a bed of roses for Nnana, after thrilling rides among street lights of unknown suburbs and freeways she would never travel again.

For a monster bears no markings of ill intent, so her biker was an epitome of fast love.

Unable to disguise a riff of anticipation one night, she asked if he intended to marry her someday.

That turned out a bad idea during a whirlwind love shared through bodies in tantric collisions and nervous groping at unisex lavatories of over-priced restaurants.

When that candle-lit dinner ended, she knew her home address, once forgotten with friends she left with a doomed business she could not stomach and despised.

Biting her words that she will never return to township life whatsoever, with bags strewn across a jacaranda clad street under golden streetlamps, she told the cab driver to take her to Wanderers Taxi Rank.

That was the year her brother was paralyzed, after a memorable rejection that stunted her ego, making a nun of her to a point of supplication and devout service of her unfit sibling.

Her service to Pampangtjie would vindicate her sinful condemnation sanctioned her by their dead parents she thought, to perhaps dredge out remorse from tacit faces of those who might have to bury them when they can never see another sun rising.

Naturally, funerals then exerted a fascinating pull for Nnana, for she tried to attend one every Saturday.

Unfazed by whatever awful exchanges between relatives or chorus-leader contests between women in mystery journeys of the betrothed, she was preparing a smoother path for their departure.

She was a decent singer herself, she’d been told on occasion; but she never felt worthy of being accompanied in praise, even when death summoned all to the disquiet of mourning.

And it was after one such funeral on the outskirts of an arid river cutting the township in half that she met three men, one a familiar face of childhood flings gone into wet sands of her deserts of lovers.

His anger had never abated it seemed, as he began denigrating her for not giving herself to the trivia of his advances.

It was thus that up a hillside, near farms and a cemetery, a bared throat of a woman being violated was choked with her panties, her head yanked back as men overlooked angels and spat at their birth.

Her cold remains were found stabbed 16 times and raped in no known order, by other mourners passing nearby, those who opted for meals queues after washing hands off the aura of graves that clung to all who are certain to die.

When the police arrived at the scene, others were already planning their attires for the next farewell trip of yet another young life snuffed undeniably by death at the hands of those who are familiar.