A Losberg Diary

A Losberg Diary

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 keeps 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 sending 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.

A Junkyard Diary

Fofa is a snuff snorting vagrant, patron saint of scavengers and madmen of Kokosi.

Skin tattooed in prison rites and rash scars that never heal, his bachelor brain couldn’t comprehend a union with the opposite sex.

Every neighborhood has its population of mad-people, some said to be bewitched, whose shadows have been stolen by sorcery, others whose minds have been deranged by chronic sicknesses yet living with infected positives.

Fofa was one such poisoned glow in virtual darkness of this group of derelict and excommunicated vagabonds, walking corroded streets in blazing daylight with high steps of warriors who face unseen assailants.

These people often build communities, slimy shelters erected in junk yards or shrubby bush patches, well-resourced as per their needs, with families sprouting among the broken remains of human discards.

Dishwasher boxes and industrial Styrofoam make for materials of Fofa ramshackle abode, roofed with thick, opaque red and green tinted plastic sheets.

Furnished scantily with a tattered queen size mattress or the remains there of, a paraffin stove and box that serves as a table, during the day the dazzling play of green and red light makes his shelter comforting.

It is one among at least nine in this stinking heap of manure, this place is precariously located between the town where white people reside and the township where the black are incarcerated.

Ditoting is a buffer zone that is more symbolic than colored areas situated to separate the two spheres of animosity from dangerous proximity and confrontation.

Here we find mainly women toiling from dawn, huddling throwaway toys and dresses, others keeping their minds away from the flies and maggots by imagining rewards of recycled products of utility and excess.

Men, the battering force that carries the bundles of card-boxes and sacks full of broken glass to recycling plants that pay starvation rations that keep the family at the dump happy for a day, often return torn and inebriated, facing children too young to dream of fresh loaves of bread.

Fofa lives among these ruined lives, happy in their merry gathering around bond fires made of wood gathered from broken wardrobes, closets full of secrets to success.

Once treasured objects would lie crushed among fodder that will fan the flames warming these faces, dream objects reminding them also, of deranged paths they had once glimpsed and lost, but still yearn for in the deepest of their sickly club.

He made his home among charred bits of stewed rubbish and rotting entrails of dead pets, discarded ornaments, among lost persons wishing never to be found, himself a fugitive from himself, after a fifteen year stint in prison.

But he had returned, living, when many return dead of heart or of body and soul.

He was also not mad, not the common place madness of dirty clothes and unkempt persons trailing caked and oily blankets while reciting monologues to their invisible company of floating ears.

He was mad, yes, but in an enticing frolic of a jester intoxicated by some inexplicably juicy joke only he heard and understood; for he wore a smiting smile that often turned to a sour grimace that meant to remind inmates of their station.

Yes, he often mistreated some scavengers on this field of forsaken treasures and skeletons because he seems to have been a self-appointed supervisor by merit of his prison creed.

A sharp tongue characterized this fellow and whomever he deemed impetuous would be ostracized by this tight commune of fools and misers.

Malice was formulaic of most of their sly dealings and with Fofa as the oracle tax collector; he had many privileges which go beyond any dignity preserved for even married men and women.

He never went to his mattress hungry or without a warm sumptuous body to warm his frozen person enraged during errands in his field or among ‘normal’ residents of Kokosi.

But he was a formidable storyteller, a jester who could reclaim mirth onto the face o a sphinx.

This man was also here by choice and will, not as aftermath of devastating poverty or need for shelter, but a lust for money and a certain degree of looting the last preserves of those deemed sociable.

He could talk coins out of any pocket, cigarettes out of fingers’ frozen clutches at winter stakeouts, he could sip any bottle dry and empty brimming trolleys with a steamy loaf of bread left for his zealous efforts.

Everyone knows Fofa and his amiable demeanor has conquered numerous fans into his rostrum of cheering voices, an ardent garden attendant and car- washer, the buzz of any tavern and early dawn ancestral ceremonies.

He had a conspiratorially valid reason for residing it this junk yard – early birds do catch fattest worms of course, and in his case, being first to scale through a garbage truck on its arrival after night shifts was like being to find treasure at the end of a rainbow.

And he was correct in his assumptions about voluminous benefits of his feat, because he also collected an extensively elaborate library of encyclopedia and erotic novels cast away by teens who outgrew adolescent crushes and muscle bound caresses.

History books about unknown worlds and vanished ones, maps, atlases, magazines and other contraptions of nostalgia now lying dead among slain excesses, would be found scattered on his queen size mattress, bibles in a variety of languages strewn across a paint streaked canvas covering his dirt cold floor.

And still on the subject of history, this junk heap is said to be situated right above the ruins of the ancestral village of this present sterile Kokosi, and it was cordially named Makweteng.

Orators of old depict a communal place of mud huts and corrugated steel shacks built by servants and farm workers during heydays of the infamous gold rush whose fever gripped this area like a pandemic.

 With unspoken brutalities witnessed by residents of these areas since time immemorial, a weird aura seeps from every rock lingering in our presence at this oppressively grave garbage field.

But above this village which was uncompromisingly decimated by powers that be during some expansion of Fochville in some late 1950’s, now stood a hunting ground for fenders and fidgeting hoarders, and in the midst of this vortex was Fofa’s life drumming forth after years of reeking cells and brutal farms.

One would wonder how many graves of bloodlines that make up this township lie under a heap of garbage and putrid landmass, because even today, people speak of ghostly sightings near and around this rotting compound, where Fofa arduously was making a living home.

Only those brave enough to face the dead were welcome into this reclusive community, and many had come and gone taunted by spirits and self-inflicted paranoia, but for those who remained a bond of brotherhood developed and no shame was ever worn on faces of these haunted people.

But it must also be said that his shelter was the biggest in the junk yard, a bookshelf housing various books, two china plates and a glassful of spoons.

Some leftover sachets of salt and other spices piled in an ice cream container, a steel kettle and dish on a three-legged table balanced with bricks, all these appliances and clutter was arranged in a clinically precise manner.

When I first encountered Fofa, these were luxuries that he boasted about among his peers around the township when on hunting prowls for loose women.

I didn’t completely believe he lived at the junk yard when we were first introduced at one of those obvious incidents of traditional gatherings with bottomless fermented ginger barrels.

But today, pigeons tossing carcasses and clawing meals from bones while cooing incessantly, rats scurrying about in hide and seek jostles; I realize that his sibilant hymn accompanied by crackling coals of dying fires is actually music each dawn for Fofa, as he had begun to name his school of master-less fliers barorisi ba morena.

A chorus of hums and groans croaked through beaks unloosening strings tangled around claws, heaving chest sacks and gnawing through bone until blood trickles.

Here, even birds have tasted blood, their own flesh cannibalized during feats with knotted wool dangling like razor sharp ankle bracelets.

Some which eventually mutilate their own troubled toes would be seen limping about wings wrestling rags and garbage while their toil, similar to that of women and children here, goes unabated even under the blazing heat of December days.

Three whirlwinds crawled over a garbage heap sending plastic shreds dancing raucously like unanchored kites above sober heads, and it was at this hour of rapid toil that a truck full of gardeners and recyclers rode into the yard to the welcoming whistles of those awaiting its deposits.

And I was among them, among damp putty in black bags, broken twigs and garbage bags seeping their brew through grimy holes torn by soot and slime of other nutritional and industrial refuses.

Acrobatics were exhibited by those who found these rides rejuvenating, children chased after dust plumes discarded by wheels of this worn truck looking rackety and about to collapse with us holding for dear life and breath.

Then we saw Fofa as we approached the garbage dump, commander of this army of rodents and persons without shame; running, rummaging and chiding those who dared scale through the rubble before his initiating turn.

The day goes down eventfully as always, with minor hushes and boisterous laughter at senile jokes about anything found in the rubble, soiled panties, torn bra straps, make up accessories and food packets, needles and condoms.

Here, poverty is a choice for the hygienic, because food stuffs, sealed cans of preserved assortments of nourishment, bottled water thought to have rotted perhaps and a load of toys and scrapped coloring books could be salvaged from this mound of wrecks and discarded fulfillments.

Pule, an all time madman of this soppy township always visits the junk yard at intervals that are interspersed between his long walks through townships streets muttering secrets to himself, and now he was huddled over a browned broken cake mixed with burnt tyre remnants.

After inspecting the cuisine delicately with his black nailed fingers, we see him munch on through our distracted chatter about where to unload our toxic cargo.

Another truck unloads hot ashes from a steel container, with chains rattling and the engine moaning for dear death after a life of carrying homes, belongings, coffins, foodstuff and broken trees.

Fafo shows our morose elderly driver a spot and directs the truck’s reversal with seasoned and masterly antics, his zealous moves, waving arms and dangling hands signaling a halt, that soon the truck tips over its rear and another heap grows upon a old ghost town underneath – Makweteng.

Earth, who tends to conquer everything with her gravely grip, makes mud of most things, but others resiliently survive any microbial assault and in turn launch their own death on the self-same earth.

Junk yards are epitomes of dead earth, scars of breathless soil, yet they also have their own pulse born of radioactive debris and bubbling acid foaming in pools among wood carvings and kitsch paintings.

Fafo seems disinterested in this mess of blistering slime and advices any handler to put their tattered gloves on; but most don’t have such luxuries of protective garments for fingers which need be nimble around elusive treasures.

And he stands on a tin drum hailing passing women and children, quarrelling with the driver of the useless mash that kills even dogs but still jesting about crippled children soon to be born from loins burned by invisible heats of the Losberg Junk Yard.

***

There is one thing about people who have been incarcerated that sticks out like a sore thumb; they have an insatiable appetite for dominance, and this translates into a venomous strictness that borders on mania.

For a person who chose his place of residence so accordingly, it could surprise some that he was as clean a house slave, meticulous about detail and tidiness of his orderly disorder.

He wanted nothing moved without his knowledge; he wanted things done at only his command.

A bully and a jester who could make you do the most debasing stunt in front of all your peers, while reciting a narration that calls for the tragedy to always wear a cloak of humor.

But somehow since our meeting, his mean streak never flounders my way; yet I can tell that his comrades in these piles of dung are a bit intimidated by him, and his prison tattoos and exclamatory voice.

A Big 5 stalwart who traversed many a numbers in prison, scars and death threats, friends maimed in dirty bathrooms and salesmen blossoming among womanized men.

His story is one among many, but what he recalls of his last seven days in prison is conversation at campfires and prison raids, when one is left in solitary confinement, such heroics make silence a friendly listener.

Yet beneath this veil of stoical demeanor was very contemplate being, who could wonder the junk yard under a bright moon, star dust and rigid figures towering in the cover of a stream of light in a shadow.

He could sense tinges of laughter welling from within at some sinister encounter, a jester who always thought to see the lighter side of life’s misery.

Nevertheless, the tale of those ‘last days’ is something that I found to the most profound parable of a man who has just found freedom for the first time in 15 years.

Spogo and Tleketleke

On this dark and moonless night, I sit with friends talking about Spogo and Tleketleke, two mundane drugs with sinisterly diabolical after-effects that have gained precarious notoriety among vagabonds of Kokosi.

They say cheap as this pill is, Spogo can knock you out for well over 48 hours, that is after a trip that leaves mouths drooping sooty saliva and brown mucus.

You aught keep an empty bucket nearby for constant deposits of piss, spit and drool, because one’s dreamy motor-reflexes tend to be sedated and uncontrollable, leaving fluids drib drab out like urine coagulated with stale sperm.

Faint heart beats, an excruciating hunger from a stomach that does not allow food, or maybe only bites of soggy potato chips bought with ten cent coins.

And avoid water by any means they say, even though dehydration would be taking its toll, because it will biliously catalyze chemical reactions on your chaffed tripe.

This concoction is disastrously infamous for its physio-transformative traits, like skin color changes which render habitual users coal black and skeletal, protruding eyes and bulging joints, a forty year old man looking like a kwashiorkor sufferer.

Most are stone-cold killers of this cursed place, since after the blackout, a brutal resurgence of wakefulness deepens the impact of withdrawals.

They would prowl the streets, buzzing for a fix and blood with which their sanity is purchased.

Undeniably, a majority of users are teens, aimlessly initiated into a virile life of prison terms and nightmares inflicted by wailing souls of those killed in the line of duty.

Tleketleke on the other hand, though malicious as Spogo, is characterized by contrasting euphoric dispositions for those who inhale its purplish smoke.

Numbness assails one from the first dozy sniff of this sordid air coiling from tin foils burned with ever grumpy lighters, and then soon after, most would opt for sleep, peaceful and stupefied.

But when you hear recitals of horrid dreams they find themselves incapacitated to awake from, one knows that this drug creates a perfect purgatory where comatose participants feel sour razor pains without willing their bodies to wretch out of the mire.

In a township surrounded by eleven mines and incredible poverty and desolation, no dream should be peaceful, I guess.

So, most dream of death, others of suicides and disgusting overdoses, all these experiments undertaken unrepentantly on these eternal stone roads of life’s perilous terrain.

Not all are murderers of course. Some are herd boys who live with cattle in ramshackle kraals on the outskirts of this bestial township, ones who are mid-men to calves during their staggering first steps.

Others opt to take long walks to unknowable destinations, pounding heads drenched in dog piss and vomit.

One is said to have walked all the way to Losberg mountain; that cursed scab on the edge of a meteor crater near Vredefort and saw unicorns and large snakes while bathing in a pond.

He is said to have returned convinced that this mountain was among the first stations of terra-formation by whatever crashed.

He believed there were still creatures living in and on the mountain, some unseen and others seen but disbelieved.

Fleeting imaginings of fragments of extraterrestrial rocks, micro-organisms, and organic matter that still linger in caves unopened in those peaks should have an effect on any population.

This place could an experimental site emitting psychically disturing effects on dreamers of a necromantic chapter of this ground’s soul, and many are haunted I still believe.

And all I witness in wonder are these downtrodden people of a rundown place of a million year old death, on a world heritage site dying of crude claims.

The Tleketleke gangs, clad in their ferociously unique fashion trends are a mark of savagery.

Pants cut way above the ankles, outgrown shirts hanging for dear life.

Canopies of woolen hats folded on tips of scarred clean cut scalps; they do look like rascals from a fifties film gone ghetto in the new millennium.

And they do score, known among peddlers as the most trusted customers, young and eager, with blood fresh for the picking. 

This is a generation of discontent, raging at pillars of power and vending machines filled with passing aspirations of their concocted lusts, bulldozing libraries with matchstick cannons and plastic machetes, clearing clinics of experimental pharmaceuticals and statistical journals of hordes unwittingly dying.

And it has to be admitted that this vicious cycle of drug binges and death is undoubtedly affecting young women as well, vulnerable descendents of brothel types and victims to rape when in euphoric comas.

A ninety’s brand of shebeen queens, skimpy vixens looking like a cast of soft-porn films, these are defiled children escaping nightly from their newborns.

They gather among loafers and other junk personalities to quench a drought of dreams, even with nightmares lived with morosely in the dark hours of solitude.

Rank smell of sleep in their armpits and odors of wet dreams and cum from forgotten intercourses; they live a story frozen in a loop and with Spogo or Tleketleke by their bedside – all is well in hell.

A Misadventure At A Tavern That Loves People

A disquieting sunset before another night of a full moon, the sun a red ball sinking into a westerly pitch of pink foamy scatterings of clouds; it is weekend in sleepy Kokosi.

From the east, a full moon rises, bright and glowing, obstructed only by slim clouds serenely drifting in high winds.

There is a chill in the autumn air, and the smell of rain lingers with every whiff of draft sweeping through the dusty streets.

Above the Apollo lights, a storm brews, plumes of dust rising crimson like a wave against the moonlight, a colossal blanket riding high above heads bobbing towards places of leisure.

Another raucous evening starts at Thandabantu, music thumbing skins of tired mineworkers with swollen pockets, while young breasts erect their nipples to the chill of colorful beverages.

Everyman seems horny here, the full moon gone menstrual in all thighs seated on crates and young boys burying cases of Lion Lager and pangas to impress schoolmates.

The DJ booth is a precarious cage, smaller than a cell of a birdcage in a zoo, and once in a while bottles are flung against the metal bars, having missed a head of a would-be victim by an inch.

Looking about, familiar bruised faces of jobless vagabonds that can be missed in any crowd sip on Milk Stout in gangs, each greedy gulp causing rage to the one who bought the beer.

Blood is always about to curdle here, and as anticipated a rumble begins rhythms of House Music wizardry, dust rattles tin roofs and shacks shake on their poles.

A nose is bleeding among some gang of frantic big-spenders, plonk in floral boxes waved over braided heads of fat women fighting with slender girls, hurling bottles and plastic cups at their unkempt weaves.

A drizzle begins in time to save the music from drowning under thunder and womanly spite, but haunted streaks continue to crawl ragingly across a biliously clouded sky.

Smudgy puddles form under dancing feet, stomped black and sprinkled in bottle caps, blood and piss washing off the walls.

All die-hard drunks are mesmerized for those few munities, a brawl and a rising moon floating in a bulge, red on the far end of the storm to whence winds seem intent on chasing for a ball hastening its ascent up the black expanse.

Screeching screams of girls pretending superstitions cause mayhem to gain pitch, men howling like wounded dogs in mimicry of werewolves, all this with piercing wails of the one who lost a nose and the bass rattling torn speakers with serenaded thuds.

The joke was horrendous, considering shacks were being uprooted in nearby Ninety-Nine, yet the DJ kept on point, providing soundtracks to the dismal anecdotes of a fun night in Kokosi.

Gathering chains of uncertain morality about my feet, I choose to leave with others who bet their last on a night well spent, but friends start streaming in, rushing from the rain I was intent on battling.

And it is then that the rain begins to pelt harder, whizzing bellows of an angry breath of demons raging on the night of a full moon and fanning homicidal tendencies haunting inebriated teens.

Accents begin to change with curses hurled at thunder spilled by drenched rap fanatics, mouths damning acts of nature in rhyme improvised over anthems on caged decks and ghetto rants of fame.

Night of blood commences, this place will see many crucified for its future wealth, body parts lost in debris of broken bottles and crumpled potato chip packets.

Ambulance lights will soon illuminate this concrete stage of our stupefied euphoria, stretchers wheeled in crushing toes of revelers in a daze of song.

The sales booth’s ever tiny at this ‘tavern that loves people’, more now with rain frothing on vomit of quick drinkers, and you know logic has gone out of circulation when three people queue to buy a single bottle.

But my friend and I wade through that mess of arms tossed for attention, among names hailed like deceased generals of unknown personal wars.

We get our set of Black Label quarts and tiptoe back to our corner perfumed by piss and shit under a noisy tin roof, our view from behind women’s dancing backs a carnival of lopsided asses stuffed in faded g-strings, chocked by glittering plastic belts.

Talk about global warming, mineworkers with constant nosebleeds and weekly wages, women working at an explosives company and the moral merits of Fanakalo as a language of indenture.

We’re incensed by this lack of tangible options in township life, where we could not even score a lay for a night this cold, purged from the mainstream mentality of motivational speeches and emotional gambles.

But eventually the mess catches on and we are huddled on crates among juveniles flaunting their hard earned wages from stints of crime or exploited labor.

We thus proceed killing hours with jailbirds and fugitives from unschooled laws of Bogroep - that infamous jail that forges unpaid laborers for farmers from prison populations.

A rope that will drag us into the mires of depravity laying woven by desensitized youths telling us about rapes, about plots to slit a warden’s throat, and their garrulous talk about girls they gang fucked behind beer crates one night of binges at this tavern.

Last night one of them nearly died, they say.

He lies in hospital while they blaze last roaches of long dead joints crammed into bottle caps, rolled into leftover shred of telephone directory books.

Never call a man a cripple in front of his crew, that’s the rule.

And as the story goes, there were bottles flung against a scar ridden head in retaliation to such slander.

Lost they might seem, but they ride a crest of a high wave propelled by instant cash from loan sharks and victims of muggings turned to unmarked graves in municipal cemeteries.

There is even gossip among young men here about lost dockets, police officers who have AIDS, about who are addicts and pimps; and who is smuggling marijuana from Swaziland or the newest dealer with first-grade Tleketleke.

Talk of brawls with mates who couldn’t stomach their liquor, bouts of bloodthirsty fits of rage when a friend was stabbed for having suspicious money to afford a bottle of Three Ships.

These are the common harangues of bored boys in filthy backyard shebeen rooms, sock stench suffocation beyond relief of cheap air-freshening tags and tobacco smoke.

And once the rain had subsided, we decide to leave the raucous company of sterile chatter and Tlokwe carton beer bingers, with their supine women trembling in the sobering chill.

Skidding on mud and puddles hiding in passageways to anywhere, we camouflage with colors of night under blinking street lamps and a startling moon after a hail storm.

Others are nursing wounds as blood mingles with flowing streams of sewage, nauseating melodies of mediocre leisure keeping nightmares alive for many left gathering remains of shattered shacks.

The night sky breathes crystal air and a gentle draft wafts between soaked dog pens, forgotten napkins on wires and puppies shaking stubborn droplets from rabid fur coats.

A gang sings prison anthems and slogans in the distance, a couple staggers from around a corner, feet sliding on sodden grass patches, dizzy from a steamy quickie behind a pile of crushed bricks.

We have a night to remember we remind ourselves and laugh; the morrow yet another beast to feed with our perpetual defeat and failing tricks.

But we love the people here, downtrodden ghosts and their lucid squalor; tracing our steps through morbid streets towards other distractions like homes and mattresses to unfold.

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.  

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.

The Funeral and A Strange Death

1

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 anesthesia or some assisted suicide 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 worshipping 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.

2

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 day by his panic-stricken wife to take him in 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, 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.

But late Sunday afternoon, reports came from the house of the sickly that he had committed suicide by jumping from the 7^th floor 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, who tells me the news as I visit him later after the funeral and my hair stands on end as I began to wonder if in 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 devilry, 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, thigh glossed by slim sweat paraded to mourners whose eyes could not be diverted from 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.

 The dead was to be buried still, and life would collapse into its normal 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.

Three Last Borns

Orion wheels through stardust on a windy night tailing reluctant virgins, and a bitch gives birth to a litter at the back of our silent shack filled with snores of children dreaming of large hounds howling menacingly at the slow feet.

Rattling shack-roofs and screeching fences fend stray dogs from a hideout chosen for fresh nuisances on four legs, to be fed and stoned by cherished palms of never-minding caregivers.

And on this night, a man is being raped by two boys at the back of a tavern, clubbed with sticks and beer crates, wounds gushing motley grease and blood backed by heaving breath and dusts of his struggle.

Scanning sordid skies that bore cold witness to his desecration with bleak and worn gazes, he vowed revenge beyond the brutality of prison as the police would only ridicule his castration.

The tale begins with an unwise young man binging until the wee hour of dawn at a cesspool named Crocodile Inn, an infamous splatter of excremental smudge on the tapestry of a serene extension in a turbulent township.

Spending his fortnight’s wages in a stupor of first time worker sugar-rush, swinging about town in search of promiscuous loves of teenagers, he became prey for picking in bloodshot eyes of blanketed men concealing oaken sticks and Okapi blades.

He apparently stared at the wrong girl among the many morose faces dancing in clear view of eyes stripping their half clad thighs looking for nearby shacks to spend the remnants of a stormy night.

His fate was sealed when he decided to leave the mayhem, and without questioning the shadows following his wrangling steps through puddles of muddy water – he was soon spitting turgid blobs waggling in puddles lit by a million lightning strikes.

No covert surveillance was ever necessary for these rookie boys bound to fall short of their saving graces, as they just lunged in attack of a man who was condemned to a night without stars.

Once the beating had reached a frenzy and the victim stiffened and grunting while titters of laughter behind poking sticks rang lowly, Smanga moaned muffled screams that went to the marrow of any humane ribcage.

While he writhed in a pulp of broken bones and mangled sinews, one biy maniacally ripped his trousers down belt buckle and all, and had his sordid rounds on limp buttocks of a man who came to grip shrubs crawling on rusty wires.

Time to peddle excuses for this display of brutal bestiality could not be his concern, as he eventually raised his bruised body from silent mud, with a resolute aim to eternally rein apostolic anathema on this duet of last borns.

Codenamed Skhova, he was first of the sordid offspring bred of initiation clans intoxicated by their taste for human blood, a slight young man, nondescript but as murderous as a serpent that you could cradle for a pet.

Untrusting and arrogant, his small round eyes always on the roundabout, glancing over beer bottles and stuffy ashtrays, he was one who always managed to smuggle any weapon into a place of revelers who wished for no pain but mere muscle strains from dance moves.

A stout and ridiculously short man; potbellied from acid concoction from backyard grannies with recipes for fast acting beverages, lips always dried, painfully cracked with nobody ever daring to stare at them – let alone women.

In their muddled thoughts, akin any crude demeanor of dogs, they are said to have returned to the same tavern to finish last sips of warm beer left untouched even by aloof girlfriends waiting smugly in their shabby bed of rosy death.

A disturbed family was waking up to the moans of their last born son who lost his first money earned as man, a cherished beacon of a fading bloodline wrestling locked braces of poverty.

His secret was to be their own and never be spoken again, as he was to continue life seeing his nemeses waltzing to dreary rhythms of a shameless people paralyzed by disconcerting circumstances.

The name Smanga ripened on his shoulders to be yoke that crucified him in a disgustingly traumatic exhibit, because even though his mother believed the tragedy’s viscid scars, she still was dumbfounded by this brand of cruelty dished unto her womb’s skin.

It was to follow that a very unrelenting sangoma was ruefully consulted by the family, to return the morbid favor to their son’s assailants and those whose blood coursed through their veins.

What followed the avaricious bargain made with a witchdoctor are explicitly wondrous tortures which were to be borne to the grave by the two defilers; faith shattering testaments of the heavy hand of enraged ancestors coupled by an infernal wrath of spellbinders.

***

Privy to this abominable secret was Phonyoka, another derelict vagabond born with an incurable skin condition that left his entire skin seeming covered in flakes resembling dried mud.

Incessantly scratching, sandpaper wearer who spent his school days hiding from mirrors and mocking bullies, he could never make friends, hence his strange camaraderie shared with Skhova. 

Pressed against skin were puss-filled growths the size of marbles, vile even for the most religious hearts; rousing such disgust that it was always decided he would occupy the rear desks at school, and over time growing a habit of loving the backseat of a taxi.

Having spent his childhood mocked and terrorized by others, he grew harboring a simmered vengeance creamed upon his crustily black skin; and it became his resolve to inflict unforgettable wounds on others.

And now incredibly haunted by the ever glowing smile of their victim sometimes seen at tuckshops, taverns and taxi ranks, dribbles of sweat often unashamedly creep down their sour armpits wilting in the heat of castrated rage.

Smanga never went to the police, that they guilefully comprehended; and only the thought of their transgression being wanton gossip among township loafers and former jail-birds was what made their hair stand on end.

Entitlements of their violent natures that sparkled in their eyes were fading with each meeting of these infamous friends, as they were now seldom seen together among habitual binge masters and shebeen guards.

Memory vilified their cruelty and recalling the screams which were loud enough to wake a child intoxicated by cough mixtures, to which no-one woke; those sounds shrieked in their guts as they gulped many their final beers over the following weeks.

The uncomforting bulgy stomach is said to have started growing like a tumor, and Skhova began to be terrified of open spaces, and over a period of nine days he was not seen outside his shack behind his mother’s RDP house.

A faded old coat huddled behind the door bolted with a chain and a lock, the key slipped therein, was the first he set aflame after dousing his property with common household accelerants.

Harnessed against a bed post and more paraffin doused over his person made his attempts at escape futile, and what unimaginable slippery moves that drained strength from a body choking on curtain and mat smoke.

When the fire was finally extinguished in the late hours of yet another day of fierce gales of winds, puss riddled blisters under Phonyoka’s skin were becoming miniature explosives detonated by an unknowable trigger.

A leper and charcoal skeleton, polluted youngsters who refused to accept the inevitable; that a fierce penance was to be paid for their evil, was sanctioned in sorcery.

Blisters became like flames bouncing against Phonyoka’s skull, and he became demented with volcanic migraines which required him to keep his eyes shut tightly with a towel and belt.

And over some weeks, these bilious crowd of sores groping through his scalp left a bumpy terrain of filthy skin strung with flimsy hair strands, his dreams drenched in sweat as he was always tried to disentangle his friend’s corpse from the ruins of the fatal fire.

Being an alcoholic and independent of charity was no shame any longer, and headaches mattered the least when nights were nigh and the tedium of growing shadows relented to giving him cover from prying eyes.

To acknowledge his failures, fragility and catastrophes, he had to drink uncontrollably, and with each day’s tension, fear gripped him and aloneness in any crowd was a safe bet.

And on the seventh week after Skhova’s death, the perversity of chance events had him there at the tavern grappling with small mercies of a passersby, having noticed Smanga throw a kerchief at his feet to wipe his oozing face. 

Eyes misted and narrowed, he sat on the edge of a crate in a dark corner of his favorite place on earth, sipping slowly his only beer as dark purples were smearing the afternoon sky.

Jostled between terror and fantasy, he thought he was imagining the aberration of a man who haunted his waking hours.

But an obstinate puzzle was only sliding into place; his death was riding on the magnificence of time’s fast drift, dejected and sour, a heinous frown cutting its forehead.

Haunted by his mortality, it seemed easier to quicken his own death through drink and infamous drugs; a soul stealing the last snores of sleep in stupor and cold black dreams.

And one night after weeks of storms and growing shrubs when cockroaches were stretching wings in flight to new colonies, he hung himself with copper wires his uncle had stolen from power stations.

Around the eleven mines of Fochville, everyone knew without word having gone around town for many a good soul that depart each day, and his was left not mourned nor cursed, for cursing the dead is anathema for those willing a life.

Epilogue

On My Street

There is a house with windows the sad bruised eyes of a whore,

A shabbily rotted wooden door wailing like a taciturn baby’s mouth.

A Cyclops house with half a face, rolling out a gravel tongue;

Some rusted caravan attached to its rear like a malignant tumor.

A walled-in house with spikes of glass fragments atop to deter birds or sordid men;

Standing on a corner, flanked by derelict shacks and wobbly dog pens.

On my street, garbage tombs scatter on dusty pathways, strangled by time and

Disused doors bolted shut and distilling resemblances of stubborn gags.

A house with a rooftop veiled in canvas anchored by broken wheelbarrows,

With four doors precariously smashed in places where windows once panelessly stared.

There’s a roofless house, abandoned and torched now housing the forsaken;

A house of gang brands and defecations, weeds cracking concrete walls frailly.

A house in company of eleven car wrecks, oil strewn grounds with carcasses of engines;

Glass doors riddled with bullet holes and careless burglar bars; unshackled pets yarning.

A house of tombstones, grinders and sand papers carving last minute memorials,

Ever drenched in white water and soot, as stones cry before their bereaved.

A house sporting colors of games and allegiances to what’s not at stake,

A house with stolen gnomes and drooping sculptures behind serrated wire meshes.

A house of assorted bricks patched together unevenly, a house of two elderly sisters who pray

Guarded by giant dogs and a riddle of a garden in an arid clime and radioactive soil.