Excerpts from Bhlawa’s Inconsolable Spirits

Mxolisi Nyezwa
Published in Deep South, 2023

Saturdays we kids went to the downtown music shop to

buy new records of our favourite musicians. I was not

aware at that time how white folks despised us hunger ravaged

kids. I was always scared of white men. Something

in their confident strides and the bulky swagger of their

bodies warned me to keep my distance. Our father at

home always told us, “We have enough food in the house,

and makwedini, I don’t want to see you loitering in town,

begging the white people for a job.” We always listened

to him, me and my brothers. He was our father and we

instinctively knew that something was wrong in the white

town.

One day my father took me and my brothers for a picnic

in dead town (as we children called the white city of Port

Elizabeth). Near Humewood we sat down in a green valley

facing the sea. My father laid down a blanket on the grass

and carefully placed our food and drinks. We were busy

chatting with one another excitedly, it was our family’s

first outing. All at once a police van driven by four white

cops stopped just opposite where we were sitting. The big

cops approached my father and spoke to him in a harsh

Afrikaans accent, warning the family to immediately pack

up and go from the area which was reserved for white

people. My enthusiasm for God disappeared. We quickly

put back our food into our picnic baskets and headed back

to Bhlawa. On the bus home we were a silent bunch, with

our father completely gutted from inside and refusing to

say anything about the incident.

Our parents and our neighbours were workers in the white

people’s homes and shops, as foremen and security men,

oomantshingilane in the harsh government clinics, police

departments and railway stations. Very few of them owned

cars. My father rode a bicycle. Every inch of their hard sweat

was returned to us in the afternoons as sweets and other

savoury delicacies from the shops in town. My father had a

brown briefcase in which he packed small groceries – bread,

eggs, fried chips, sliced polony and the Evening Post. He

took it every day to work and opened it dramatically every

evening to share the food with us. Sometimes it was fish

and chips that he brought from the Chinese shops in town.

During the lazy mornings on weekends, my brothers and

myself would play children’s games with the other kids in

Madala. The streets where we played feverish games were

safe avenues where we slowly learnt about the beauty and

the ugliness of life.

Every house in Bhlawa had a waskom, a washbasin to wash

our black skin of the dirt of apartheid. I suppose keeping

our bodies clean freed us in a way from the hatred of white

people. The names of Tambo and Mandela frightened our

parents. Children from strict Christian homes like ours

were forbidden to mention those two names. I went to

church, to school or spaza shops looking all the time at

the cluttered buildings in front of me. At the shops we

got bhuzayz and oonothethayo sweets when we bought

bread and sugar. Sweet messages like “I love you”, or

“Be my girlfriend” were engraved like hieroglyphics on

onothethayo, the talking candies.

We were often visited by our uncles who would ask us

children to sizithuthe, recite our clan names. My father’s

family is of the Mabamba clan. Ukuzithutha, singing our

patrilineal praises, included the recitation of ancient

names of the family ancestors (on my father’s side) and

family totems. Our praises often went like this: “Mna

ndinguMbamba, uThangana, uKrila, uBholose, uRhaso,

uNqeno, uMalishe, uTshobathole kaNgqika, uMbombo,

uBhodlinja (“the one who burps like a dog”) … and so on.

The one who remembered and sang the most izibongo

(praises) was given a pat on the back. On occasion a small

gift was even offered to encourage him.

The practice of ukuzithutha transmitted our amaXhosa

traditional culture and helped people to remember their

clan’s lineage. Ukuzithutha encouraged boys to become

the custodians of their culture. I always dreaded the

coming to our home of one old man, Uncle Limba, who

had a horrible habit of kissing small boys on top of the

head. He would almost always ask, “Ungubani kwedini?”

whenever he visited, expecting us boys to identify our clan

names. A wet kiss on top of the head inevitably followed

the correct answer of “Thangana, Krila…” We would run

away immediately, unclasping ourselves from the leering

grasp of Tat’ uLimba, dreading his wet alcoholic kisses on

top of our heads.

— —

A magisterial boundary wall sliced the back of our house

in Madala Street neatly into two half-houses. Behind a

shimmering wooden door there was a toilet which we

shared with our neighbours. Sometimes, feeling the urge

to relieve myself, I would quickly run outside with a torn

page of a newspaper, only to find the toilet locked. I would

wait some minutes outside, jumping up and down, trying

to relax my stomach nerves. The wooden door of the toilet

would just stand there, not budging. I would knock, now

loudly calling out to the user inside to hurry up, but there

would be no answer.

The toilet’s wooden door had two vents, above and below,

each the size of a tiny window. Sometimes a prankster

would lock himself inside, for no clear reason, staying

there inside for hours. I guess some people used the toilet

for their sex meetings. You always had to look through

the opening at the bottom of the toilet door to ascertain

the real business of the user inside. And when crouched

low enough, and peeping through the opening, your eyes

would normally fall on the two large feet of the user who

was sitting on the toilet seat, emptying their bowels. You

would hear the loud groans as the occupant relieved their

cramped stomach. Sometimes when you looked through

the lower opening of the locked toilet, there would be no

sign of life, no feet. And you would be mortified by the

strange scene of an empty toilet that had locked itself from

inside. How did this happen? How did they come out from

the toilet leaving the door latched inside? This remained a

mystery to us for years until someone revealed the secret.

The mysterious culprit with the invisible feet had been

standing on the toilet seat to hide his feet.  We found out this

was Tshupi’s favourite game.

Tshupi loved to smoke zol. Every night when he was stoned

he would bawl out loud like a donkey for the whole

community to hear, shouting insult after insult to everyone

in his family. Sometimes in Tshupi’s drunken rants all of

us in Madala Street were targets. He was a harsh poet of

the black night, always dazzling the sleeping night with

his curses. “Amangcwaba enu aluhlaza. Amangcwaba

enu anilindile. Niza kufa nonke, omnye emva komnye.

Ndinigcinele imoto encinci. Mzoxolo! Mzoxolo! Ndiyafunga

uzakuhamba ujikeleze iBhlawa ngemoto encinci enamavili

amabini.” (Your graves are green. They are waiting for you.

You will die, one after the other. I found a tiny cart for you.

Mzoxolo! Mzoxolo! I swear you will drive around Bhlawa in

a small car with two wheels).

I knew that trapped inside our bodies there was a spirit

child, a restless angel that dared to go out from the strict

confines of the human body to roam the entire world. All

of us were grieving angels. Yet every one of us had learnt

and imbibed the hard and sullen ways of our oppressors.

That was why at night all humans in the township were

consumed by nightmares. Tshupi was another fallen angel,

a restless soul child who had fallen into a bottomless

human body. Mzoxolo, the neighbourhood boy who Tshupi

had been cursing, had turned notoriously bad in his ways,

robbing people and delivery vehicles that drove to Bhlawa.

His life of crime ended after a violent shootout with the

police in one of his attempted robberies when he was shot

and badly injured in the spine, and became paralysed from

the waist down.

Tshupi never bothered to improve his character or

abandon his habits, even though he was punished every

time after misbehaving. He was the sweetest person in

the world when he was sober, with a lovely singing voice.

When he whistled a tune with his lips, the little boys in

the township came out from the street corners to see

him, so did the birds from their warm nests. Tshupi got

along very well with everyone. We crowded around him to

listen to his fascinating tales about animals in the forests.

Sometimes he related to us movies he claimed to have seen

at the Rio Bioscope. He was a few years older than us. On

Saturday mornings my mother would often send him to

accompany me and my brothers to a fish shop in Dasi to

buy masbhanka fish. My mother would then ask him to

clean the raw fish and dry it in the sun for our evening

meal. In the right mood he was a responsible guy.

— —

Tshupi’s young brother, Sakhiwo (we called him Khiwo),

was a different kettle of fish altogether. He liked wandering

all about the township alone, not really wanting to be with

anybody. No one really knew what dark ideas and missions

were brewing in his young head, as he was entirely

secretive. But at the same time he could be surprisingly

candid in conversation, outright and eager when he wanted

to be understood. He was also a great storyteller, highly

original and extraordinarily imaginative. Many years later,

I would think of Tshupi and his dreaming brother Khiwo

as the main inspiration behind all my chaotic writings. I

also wanted to talk about hidden truths, to write about

a world where nothing germinates and nothing blooms.

To write about the hard block of frozen ice that we called

our cherished home. I found despair in politics. My eyes

wanted to study the dry lakes of the world. I was bound in

musical prayers and hearty laughters. I was not interested

in bedrooms. What made me real was the sound of the

heart beating. I had no premonitions. In my world there

was no space for prophecy. For several hours in any day I

became like my young friend Khiwo, an island or lake that

had been forgotten.

Khiwo was much younger than me, about my young

brother Seko’s age. His iintsomis (for that’s what his

fantastic stories were) were all rooted in distant ravines

and jungles, populated by flying fairies, scheming ogres

and enchanted jackals and wolves. All the creatures that

came out of his head were charming in a humorous kind of

way. Every creature in his stories could talk, in English or

isiXhosa or even Afrikaans. He would imitate the sounds

and words made by the wily jackal as he fooled umVolfo

with an uncooked meal, “Vrityi vrityi vrityi, umngqusho

uvuthiwe! Vrityi vrityi vrityi, ndithi umngqusho uvuthiwe!”

Frogs, spiders, stones, rivers, leopards, thikoloshes,

giraffes, mirrors, house doors, forests, dying angels and

garden walls, they all spoke in a secret language whether

they were upset or happy, or flying away from the land of

the winds to the big home of the star angel. For Khiwo, all

animals in the world had hidden wings. Even plants and

flowers could fly sometimes. Anyone could see animals

and flowers flying or talking excitedly if they look around

carefully in the township.

Khiwo’s storytelling gifts were boundless. We would sit

next to him and listen to his enchanting voice, his stories

completely fascinating us, laughing till our stomachs

forced us to go to the outside toilets to pee or shit. Jackals

and wolves didn’t only wear clothes but put on three-piece

suits, ties and sleeping gowns. At times they also wandered

about in the forests of the world carrying guns and knives.

His stories enacted his curiosity and nightmares about the

many faces of the bizarre city that encroached upon our

poor lives, making its deathly presence felt around our

township, confounding everyone, including our parents,

with its fascinating disguises and lies.

I was still a small child when I woke up to face my fears.

The spirit of darkness was upon me. It informed me that

horses’ hooves would come to crush my body. My limbs

would be impoverished and all the holes of my heart that

were leaking pus or blood would remain without hope, like

the poor Hozana traders at Njoli Square street market.

My brother Mbambeleli stood and faced me, one hand on

his waist. He was agitated. His chest was heaving noticeably

and his eyes looked venomous and huge. “Mxolisi, what

are you doing? Have you lost your mind? Why must you

always look for a scolding from Mother?” My stubborn

silence angered him. I dumped the heavy black bag from

my shoulder onto the ground. I continued digging a hole in

the black earth that we used as a vegetable garden in our

backyard in Madala Street.

I walked into the woods one day and I could not walk out.

I walked into a grove with running streams and I heard

poetry being recited. In awe I stood and watched insanity

grow. I watched children grieve into sunset, driven like

slaves into the valley of a bending river. All in a single line,

driven from houses with no doors into the bleary silence.

A guard stood behind them with a whip and a smile and

smoked.

Where I stood, the black forest blinded my eyes and silenced

my fears of all the beatings in the world. The forest hid

luminous spirits and menacing goblins. One night the Lord

of the Forests, referred to by his three million wives as

NEXT WORLD, convened an important gathering. Heroes

and bandits from all parts of the world were called. The

voice of the Lord of the Forests was sad.

“Humans are plotting against us.”

“Humans are traitors.”

“Let us collect money and light the candles and the fire in

the wood.”

“Death will snatch the babies.”

“The forest will harass the women.”

“The old people will denounce their ancestors.”

“What about the words men speak?”

“What about their language?”

“The sky will burn the tongues of the living ones!”

Maybe these endless hallucinations were the first clear

signs of poetry in my life. I searched for poetry in simple

places, in hospitals and in places of overwhelming beauty

or sadness. At first I was confused, but after a while

I became elated, speechless with a strange madness.

I began to notice that the sun is like a far-off planet in

the blistering distance, a regal monster with besmirched

clothing. I researched the customs of the hobos and the

drunken people in the township. I tasted their bitter liquor,

and got drunk from umqombothi, the native beer that is

brewed in the open, under the terrible sky. During the deep

night my solar plexus grew its own enigmatic wings, and

my eyes revelled in the sight of formidable kingdoms and

magnificent revolutionaries.

— —

At home I would wake up from a midday or an early

morning nap convinced that I had overhead all the

conversations that went on during my sleep in our tiny

house in Madala. Maybe my subconscious mind was indeed

a daytime prowler who slipped out of my sleeping body

and sauntered about the mazy streets of Bhlawa disguised

as a shadow. It bothered me that no one at home took any

notice of my soul’s escapades. I would work myself up into

a fit trying to convince my parents about the numerous

conversations that I had heard in my sleep, as my spirit

loomed and wandered about the kitchen or dining room.

“I came into the room just as you were reaching out for

your cigarettes on the table Tata. Ma was sitting over there

mending a shirt. You were talking about our school fees.”

I would blurt out these dramatic revelations to a bored

audience. But no one cared to listen. They had other

significant businesses of the real world to focus their lives

on. But many years later I would meet poets who saw the

world as I did.

— —

For many days I sat in my room in Madala facing a whiteboard

that I hung on the wall to work on my algebra. Everything

came together in numerical figures and variables on the

whiteboard. I threw myself into them, staring for hours

at complex algebraic equations and finding swift methods

to reduce the expressions to their simplest forms. I got

so much into algebra that I sometimes forgot to take my

meals or go to the toilet. My eyes lit up when something

equalled 0 or 1. I thought God hid in the equations or

behind the variables, and solving for x meant identifying

the holy presence.

I lost weight and my eyes began to water and itch. I ignored

this and simply refused to slow down. I quickly became

constipated with my tensions. I grew miserable and small.

I thought my death was imminent. I sat in my small room

in Madala facing a black window and a white wall with

no pictures, ruminating about small geometric shapes,

calculating the busy life-span of numbers. My flights of

algebraic fancy ended abruptly when it came to me, with

a sudden and terrible force, that God manipulates the

variables. Life’s problems would never equal 0 or 1. It was

all a waste of time.

I quickly went back to being a pessimist. I wished the

fighting in the streets would come to an end and the

gunshots fall silent. I wrote a dark poetry of ghoulish men

and women with uncertain futures. My freedom came one

day from a Reader’s Digest book, in an article about the

Spanish civil war, which concluded with the blue words of

a Garcia Lorca poem. This poem pointed to an exit door

from my dungeon. Its language of hope and healing burnt

to ash all the murdered. I was in higher primary school

then, Johnson Marwanqa. It was just before the 1980 school

boycotts. I did not partake in any school sport. I despised

the school’s choir which felt like a soldiers’ regiment, firing

horrible notes at everyone.

— —

There was so much that I didn’t know. I asked my father

about life and got no answer. He was a man of action

who didn’t think much about the behaviour of animals

and humans, or why the sun went up every morning the

way that it did, or why so many things including stars,

died suddenly, erased from their chaotic lives like they

were never born. All these were traumas which gave me

many sleepless nights. I was worried about the beggars in

the streets and their lives, which brought bewilderment

to people. I was fascinated by the settling dust on our

furniture at home and the ticking wings of the giant clock

on the wall. I wondered at what time the black crows

would fly out in the evening. Many of my friends at school

believed that words had no power over guns and machines,

that technology and science were superior to human

conversation. Well, not me: poetry moved out of its prison

for me those days.

I often found talking to people in Bhlawa distressing. Some

of my friends completely terrified me with their dreams of

success. I had no heart for lonely ambitions. From where I

stood, nothing was going anywhere. School had not assured

me of any future. My parents didn’t have enough money.

Profound poverty was waiting for me down the short road

of my dismal black life. Feeling weighed down by the

world, I resorted to words to release the heaviness that I

felt in my heart. Without poetry, the empty sockets of my

eyes and my sliced hands would have been digested inside

the grumbling stomach of the Casspirs. My father was a

strict man, intolerant of dissent or indiscipline within the

family. Yet from him I learnt to be soft and pliable like a

reed. His lessons of love also taught me perseverance. He

taught me to stand my ground. I often heard tales of how

defiant men, locked inside the grey walls of state hospitals

and solemn prisons, were broken down slowly to become

soft like the insides of men’s eyes.

— —

Growing up in a family like ours with two working parents,

we children often had no one to look after us. Our parents

did the best they could do, but they could never be present

continuously to cater for our needs. As a result my brothers

and I often struggled to keep up with the progress of other

kids around Bhlawa. Our Bantu Education, poor as it was,

was interrupted by the school boycotts, strikes, and police

raids of the 1970s and 1980s. Young people like us have

sometimes been called a ‘lost generation’, and they were

not wrong to say that. I was lost most of the time. I never

quite knew what was expected of me. I never knew how

to begin a conversation with the apartheid system which

sought to dehumanise me. I grew afraid and became wild.

When I stared at a newspaper, I imagined that behind the

black letters on the pages there were extravagant voices

that were muted in sleep, places where children lived

happily, worlds with no angry soldiers or police, where

calm and resignation transformed easily into flowers, and

wet skies covered the clouds.

I stretched my legs and began my walk to my school, half a

kilometre away, carrying my school bag over my shoulders.

A boy who always stood at a corner of Mendi Road smoking

a zol, greeted me during my walks to school and around

my township. I wanted to erase from my memory much

that I found intriguing and wildly boisterous about our

world in Bhlawa – things, happenings, and people I found

too contradictory for my peace of mind. I wanted to make a

public demonstration of my love for words. I resented my

friends who I felt hadn’t yet mastered the art of conversing

with the dead, or invisible friends, or flying spirits from

other worlds, ancestors who appeared in dreams as bees

and other insects. There at Mbizweni square, where groups

of boys and girls were partying, I wanted to go onstage and

sing my poems for the whole world to listen.

At school my maths teacher taught me to be patient with

the world, to act slowly. To look at two or three things

with the eye of someone who never rests from looking and

thinking. In this way the geometry of the world emerged.

A husband leaves his wife and children and elopes with

a beautiful twin. The room they enter appears awkward

pictured from a camera. The small house is built on a steep

hill. To get up to the top you crawl on all fours. A window

faces a tired looking structure, a grim cliff, a granite rock.

The room has no ceiling. A green chair stands in the

middle. The room is hollow like a grave. One angle of the

crumbling balustrade stairs appears slanting down from

an obtuse plane, like a drowning ship. The other angle

moves on with the times, apparently not bothered at all

that everyone else shits hard rocks and stones every other

night in the communal toilets.

— —

When I look back at South Africa thirty and forty years

ago, I realize we had been in a civil war. I myself did not

have an urge to destroy anything. Instead of being violent

to my tormentors I avoided them, trained myself to say

and do very little in their presence. I saved all my energy

for my writing. Father used to say that a good man walks

away when a woman scolds him. He told us to never bend

to oppression, and use our physical strength properly. He

often told us not to expect good news or good fortune. Our

family were not a lucky lot. We never found providence

and fortune in the world. We always had to toil damn hard

to feed our stomachs.

By the time I was a student in higher primary school, I

could see that nothing was sacred about the holy church.

Neither the crying baby, the flying dove nor the human

soul. I despised the Holy Ghost’s geometrical tomb which

devastated arithmetic.

At home I played the music of Bob Marley or another

disgruntled spirit of the Third World in the radio cassette.

An unruly element attracted me to shebeens and plump

women in black clothes. Prodigious artists like my friend

Shepherd, with their rejected art, music and poetry, found

a home without judgement in the raucous rooms of a small

tavern in Mtimka Street fondly named Nozililo (Home of

Tears) by its patrons. I sang softly with the artists. I wrote

down on a piece of paper the lyrics of the drifting songs as

I heard them, and put it inside a brown envelope.

I was with Ngqayimbana, Dumi and Mkhu at Johnson

Marwanqa Higher Primary. Throughout our bleak days there

we were never fooled by anyone. We just knew that dead

town was not friendly to black children. But there in our

township, where there was darkness, light would emerge.

Despite all the hardship, deep down, we instinctively knew

that our township was like a caring mother.

I wore my khaki school uniform at Johnson Marwanqa like

an infantry man, a soldier of books. One freezing morning

I had to walk to my school barefoot because my only pair

of shoes was in a suitcase left behind in Grahamstown.

Comrades were shouting “Liberation before Education”, a

violent political slogan we sang in school. Many of the young

black people in my community were living tumultuous

lives of struggle and seething poverty, damnation of both

the body and the soul. I was puzzled by the rage of my

friends. I did not like the people of dead town, but I did

not believe that our problems in Bhlawa would go away by

butchering their gullible spirits.

Every other day a police squad would arrive at our school

in a mellow yellow to pick up boys belonging to the ESP,

the Equal Society Party. The police lieutenant would

disturb our classes, interrupt our lessons to address us.

“Enough of your nonsense! I know some of you – you are

crafty devils! You are members of the ESP. We are going to

catch you one by one!” The lieutenant would say this so

threateningly and when he raised his long finger to warn

or insult us, my heart rose and fell with the motion of his

red finger inflamed by the violence of his temper.

— —

Children like us were born daily in the street, at the

daybreak of funerals like pretty dark birds with wet wings,

harbouring feelings of guilt, blind misgivings. They were

fated to die alone at the drop of a hat on a lonely day,

perhaps a Wednesday or some ordinary summer’s evening,

blinking at the stars. Yet their suffering was complete. Their

solitude surprised everybody, including their parents. In

Bhlawa it was better to die alone in the sea, like my friend

Ngqayimbana.

Ngqayimbana had died very young, only sixteen years old.

Nobody ever told me the cause of his death. At his funeral a

preacher mentioned death by drowning, but Ngqayimbana

hated the sea. He sometimes joined us on our morning

jogs to Bhlawa beach. One day he was there, busy laughing

and joking with everybody. The next day, he was dead.

Apparently he had woken up one morning and dressed in

his khaki school uniform like he was going to school. But

then he changed direction on the way to school and crossed

the railway bridge at Mpelazwe, walked past the industrial

shops of Deal Party and Carbon Black, and headed straight

for the deserted beach. Then he walked into the sea and

died by drowning.

In the agony of his funeral at Veeplaas I realized that the

only thing that oppressed people do well together is to

sing. Other than that, everything is done in loneliness –

suicide, rape, murder, death, even love. Things that the old

men and women in our township, after much suffering,

had understood as private.

Some days in Bhlawa were days for suicides and murders. I

wondered why deaths often visited us on Sundays. Nothing

was ever specific except the suffering. Years later I became

a deliberate drinker at Bra Ncesh’s tavern in Gqamlana,

remonstrating every night with the devil. Life was too

short, and drinking alcohol brightened up the days. The

poetry I came to live dwelt in poor houses with no pictures

hanging on the walls, no tall arched windows. I drank my

beer wrested from the world of the crucifix. In Gqamlana

someone had locked a dog inside its kennel.

I knew nothing about the cries of children who woke up

one day robbed of their lives. Nothing in the world would

console my heart except the hard pressure of another

tortured being, pain from a kindred heart. Small coffins

had to be built very quickly by sorrowful men to bury the

tiny bodies in Veeplaas. The graveyard was a huge and

desolate field where ghosts and ageless spirits gathered

daily to torture the township. It was where I first observed

the ceremony of the burial of dead children, schoolkids

shot down by the violence of Casspirs and state machinery.

On that Saturday morning my father called out to us,

“Come now makwedini, masiwakeni, let us take a walk,”

calling me and my two brothers for a stroll around the

township. It was during that leisurely walk that I saw the

black spectacle of that burial. A dark mood hovered above

like a predatory animal. The slow events of the ceremony

unfolded for a brief second before my eyes as my father

ordered us to quickly walk past the roads that led from the

cemetery. The burial of the schoolchildren left a permanent

and disturbing scar inside me, an image of the commotions

and the dying angels.

Everything that could have gone wrong in our lives had

indeed gone wrong. The swimming pool at Phendla Street

had its waters drained out. Rio Bioscope had perished in

smoke. An accident on the road had torn the black curtains

of the bioscope down, torn the enchantment of the

children apart, and broke from inside the church bells the

soul’s clamorous anthems. Drunk parties clashed at the

corner. Door-to-door visits were performed for the city’s

elections. A spaza shop opposite our house in Madala

Street was burnt down. In the cold street the bandit shoe of

the night watchman remained open, confronting the days,

contemplating the bolting silence.

Everywhere I went I heard rhythms, and I saw sounds and

mystified lyrics. I wanted to breathe under the horrific

waves and see things clearly, but there was dust in the air,

putrefied animals and insects with brown exoskeletons.

There is nothing as defiant as the blue sounds of the

township, melodies that march eerily towards my veins. At

night I wanted to take a leaf from the melodious wind and

step outside into the streets of Bhlawa and sing with the

night’s alley. To sing of everything that agitated my soul,

everything that angles gloriously upward as it empties

itself of freedom.

— —

We carry the hefty price of freedom on our shoulders.

We also want to do everything now, to decapitate the

nightmares of our violent history with one blow. For

Bhlawa, a township that has swum in a dark pit for so long,

is such a feat possible? Nobody wants to know where poor

people live, what they eat or don’t eat, and how they die.

In fact we have become accustomed to talking about poor

people with such assertive fervour and wizardry of words

that the poor have become appendages and shadows,

devices to instantly anaesthetise our innermost feelings.

The professional lie thrives in the new breeze.

The day my schoolteacher at Thembelihle gave me a zero

mark for a writing assignment, that was the day I stopped

dreaming of becoming a biology or chemistry teacher in

a township school, and became a restless poet. Mr. Caper

stood in front of the shocked and embarrassed standard

ten class displaying the dreadful mark on my script – 0 –

for all my classmates to see. I was a young boy with a calm

temperament, but burning coals were already gathering in

the furnaces of my soul. No one, not even my classmates,

could feel its rising temperature.

One teacher asked, “Mxolisi, what would you like to grow up

to be?” I answered without a pause, “A sweeper of streets

and a polisher of men’s shoes.” I have not strayed that

much from that. Every wish that I harboured secretively in

my heart like a pebble has been kindly granted to me by

the universe. What is there to worry about? I can sleep at

night, and pray softly upon awakening in the morning. One

summer’s day I saw a blue seal dancing happily in the sea.

The dawn of democracy didn’t mean anything to me. I had

a poet’s vision of the world, a skewed lens of a triangular

vision. I had lived too close to death so very often that

life and its supposed magnificent virtues and qualities

astonished and frightened me. It was not easy to be a child.

But Bhlawa in those days was more sunlight and sunrays

than dereliction and squalor. The residents could manage

their state of poverty. Poverty had made us all equal.

When I look back at the interiority of our township lives,

the liturgy of our oppression, its disorderly aura, I forgive

myself for my bit of insanity.