Eben Venter’s book, a creative blend of autofiction, animal fable, mystery and scientific enquiry, is an urgent plea to save one of earth’s megaherbivores. An elegiac work for numerous voices, Decima is a moving and thrilling lament to loss in all its many guises.
It is the day of my appointment with the sangoma. The sky is watery, with flecks of pale gold – early spring in the Eastern Cape. Black jeans and a polo with bright horizontal stripes seem appropriate for my outing. In the thin hours of the morning, my dream: a sign here that kept disappearing; a hand, winter-white and lifeless; and the colour blue. Until I meet the sangoma I will not know if there is meaning in any of this.
My question to the sangoma is simple: can a person enter the Great Fish River Reserve, harvest rhino horn, and leave safely? Not that I would dare or ever want to, but I need to know to tell the story I want to tell. In front of the shaving mirror, a speck on my shirt, the dropping of a housefly. I try to pick it off with a facecloth.
The plan, too, is simple. I will drive from here, from my mother’s house in the retirement village, to the BP Garage on Stamford Road, off the N2. A man by the name of Thulani Lani Klaas will wait for me there. Either he’ll get into my car, my mother’s actually, but she doesn’t drive any more, or we’ll use his car. I hope it’s his. From there, Thulani will take me to the sangoma’s house in Motherwell. I have never been to Motherwell, one of the biggest and oldest townships in South Africa, nor have I met Thulani, but he knows the sangoma. Thulani Klaas is my contact. All in all, the trip has been carefully planned, there is no need to be anxious.
My mother is at the dining-room table. She has set it with her antique crocheted tablecloth, a Noritake plate, and a pretty teacup. On the plate, two butter-brown rusks, with bitterish Nescafé in the cup. At this point of the story, I am in Paradise Flamingo Gardens Retirement Village. My mother slides her hand past the tiny jug of hot milk to enfold mine. She says the breakfast prayer. Then: you can have my car. I thank her for the prayer, which I regard as a blessing, as I no longer have the right to say such prayers.
As I gather my stuff for the outing, my Leica camera, a charged iPhone, notebook, pencil and waterbottle, my mother grabs my elbow with her bony, beautiful hand: my child, she says, don’t go and die before me, that is all I ask.
I pass cliffs wild and dense with Eastern Cape flora distracting me from my busy-ness – the ominous greens, the last of the season’s aloes, those perky flames, plumbago tumbling bluely, and prickly pear, tolofiya as it’s locally known. And the tree-men pointing plump fingers at the heavens, from the large euphorbia family, also called sweet noors, and a splash of orange-blossomed tecomaria capensis.
At that point, lasting not very long at all as I speed along at 130 km/h, I recall my mother’s farewell words. Of course she is scared. She hardly knows where Motherwell is and, what’s more, I’ll be outnumbered, maybe the only white person this Saturday morning in the entire township. As for the sangoma – my mother draws on the Afrikaans ‘toordokter’ to explain it to herself: a witchdoctor who can and will perform supernatural acts on her son.
I pull in at the BP on Stamford Road and find a parking place. The service station operates like a village square: in chilly sunlight a girl’s mother-aunt plaits her hair next to Cars & Suds, where two more aunties in pink overcoats and two boys, both with Guinness beanies, hand-wash a car, taxis and buses pull up, fill up, tyres are kick-tested, then pumped.
I step out of the car and make myself visible. Thulani has to find me; I don’t know what he looks like. What a place this is – at the café, pap and boerewors and chakalaka tomato smoor are today’s special.
Time passes. No Thulani.
At last I hear my name. It is pronounced correctly by Thulani. Okay, we’re going in his car, one of those new luxury Mercedes-Benz models.
“Some of the shacks in NU29 are new, I can tell. Raw constructions of salvaged corrugated iron and wooden pallets. This is where my poacher will come from, from that yard with its scraggy orange tree.”
He says Motherwell, sinks the e, his tongue lapping lower teeth. It’s where he grew up, and he’s going to show me. Thulani. Bucket-style hat with a Burberry design. As he shakes my hand he rests his sunglasses on the brim.
So now we’re on the R335, which is also the road leading to the Great Fish River Reserve. To the right, bright white-and-blue shacks, on the left, Motherwell proper.
I tell you because I know what you’re after, this is the start of the NU29s, and this is where you’ll find the men who go out during the day to hunt. Bushmeat. Wildsvleis. It’s theirs, he makes sure I hear that.
NU?
Neighbourhood units. All of Motherwell is divided into numbered NUs. He shifts somewhat in his beige pants, he’s made himself comfortable on these over-firm seats.
Some of the shacks in NU29 are new, I can tell. Raw constructions of salvaged corrugated iron and wooden pallets. This is where my poacher will come from, from that yard with its scraggy orange tree. The second poacher will be a young Afrikaans guy, full of plans, afraid of where life’s taking him.
You have not been listening, Thulani says. We swing right into Motherwell and he snaps into best guide to Motherwell mode: here’s Bap’s Kitchen Hot Chips Steam Bread Amagwinya. Yes, over there, all those shipping containers the corporate red of Vodacom, all linked up, doorways cut out of the steel so you can walk from one to the next. It’s the Vodacom shop, very attractive in that red of theirs, that’s how I see it.
Thulani looks at me again, determined to show me his Motherwell. Okay, here’s the hostel for single men, the hostel dwellers, oldest building you could say in Motherwell, one of the first with its red bricks and all. Interrupting his guided tour stuff, Thulani says: you see, I made it to Fort Hare University for History and English and such, next thing it’s the 1976 uprising against your language, man. You could say I was willingly forced to join COSAS, and the next thing I’m caught just here, other side, I’m going to show you the actual street corner, the SAPs with their hairy arms had me with my hands spread-eagled, I pray in that moment but no, they find five pages in my pockets, now that was photocopies from Steve Biko’s book. You know it? I Write What I Like.
I know it. The book was banned then, I say. I picked up a copy in Amsterdam and when I returned to South Africa I had it sewn into the lining of my coat, a woollen one lent to me by my father for the cold over there.
You brought that book into the country?
I did.
I guess there are whites like you too.
I like the bit where Biko talks to the judge about skin. And then the judge says, but aren’t you more brown than black? And then Biko says to the judge, but you, aren’t you whites more pink than white?
Thulani smiles. Nobody wants to be pink unless you’re a pig.
But you get white pigs and black pigs too, and black-and-white pigs. And we both laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
They’re all just pigs made of the same pig flesh, I say.
At that moment, by the way Thulani looks to his left at me, eyes creasing at the corners, I sense our common humanity for the first time since I got into the car.
Well, you know it then. It is a good book for whites to read too, says Thulani. Even now.
At this he fishes out a tin of Zambuk ointment, that trickiest of tins to open. His pinkie licks up a smidge of the eucalyptus salve and applies it to his lips.
“We’re guided outside again, and across a patch of lawn there is the pole with the horns, ixhanti they’re called, and we come to a rondavel – why did we first go into igqirha Nolala’s lounge?”
He says: blacks will get ideas if they read that, the white government thought, and they were right. So photocopies of the pages were circulated among COSAS members; we thought it would be safer than being found with the book on you. It was precious stuff. I spent twenty-four hours in prison, a hellhole, let me tell you, that time I spent there, it wasn’t for a human being. But here I am now. He looks at what I’m photographing, he misses nothing. I see you’ve got a lot of sky in your pictures.
No, but I get everything in, don’t you worry.
He laughs. He knows what Motherwell is, how it looks. Here is Masakh’iSizwe Resource Centre with a physiotherapist, legal services, all those things. The walls are a pink with black writing.
Another picture.
I think Thulani likes me. He is of course a wonderful guide, making sure he caters to me specifically. In turn, I take everything the way he wants me to, at least I think so.
Almost there. The car slows down, turns left and left again. Thulani doesn’t use his GPS. NU6B, he says. Here the houses are a decent family size with tiled roofs and yards walled in at man height, mostly an apricot colour, with two twirled sugar-stick columns framing the garage entrance – a vernacular not completely unfamiliar to me. I also notice a pole planted inside some, but not all, yards, barely visible above the walls. We pull up. Buck horns mounted on top of a pole with a prickly air-plant stuck in between – at this point I inhale, a sharp, involuntary intake, in anticipation of my meeting with the sangoma, hoping that I will understand her, and that she will accommodate me, and that I will know what to ask to get the information I want, even though I don’t know exactly what that is. Only that this outing has been planned for weeks, down to the cash payment for the consultation and the fuel for Thulani Klaas’s car. I press the window button to spit but fear that saliva could hit the passenger door handle of Thulani’s new car and so I gulp it down – whatever, it’s nothing really.
You know, Thulani says, it’s not correct to use the word sangoma for this woman. In isiXhosa we prefer to say igqirha, she has the divine gift, but she has also converted to semi-Christianity. You could say she didn’t like to be a traditional igqirha, those kinds of persons that existed in Xhosa-lands long before Christianity arrived, but she couldn’t escape the calling either. So her calling is based on the instructions and guidance of the ancestors, but you’ll see that she also makes use of her Bible.
Thanks, Thulani. I’m glad to have been given a consultation.
Mogogoshe Street, the street of sangoma Nolala, or rather igqirha Nolala – it’s hard to pronounce. Her house has two twirled columns, each with a Corinthian crown; the garage door is wide open. Scarcely have we parked when she appears in red-speckled indigo shweshwe. A baby-blue towel round her hips, pinned at the left, another towel across her left shoulder and a doek in the same shweshwe, topped with a thick, plaited band enfolding her head, making her appear taller. At her neck, hanging between her breasts, is a double-strand of carmine and bottle-green glass beads that reaches to her waist.
She holds out her hand to greet me, a broad silver ring on her finger, pronounces my name melodically, then addresses Thulani in isiXhosa – not everything said here will be accessible to me.
We walk into her yard – there is her pole with the buck horns, I count three pairs – then she takes us into her house, into a lounge with a huge flatscreen, while from a puffy, chocolate lounge suite three children and a woman who could be their mother look across at us, the visitors, and back at the screen. We’re guided outside again, and across a patch of lawn there is the pole with the horns, ixhanti they’re called, and we come to a rondavel – why did we first go into igqirha Nolala’s lounge? Here, without instructing me – it is Thulani’s manner, I’ve realised – we are to remove our shoes. Igqirha Nolala enters first, sits down and folds her legs in under herself, feet pointing to the left, while Thulani and I sit opposite her on grass mats.
I don’t throw bones, she announces straight away.
Extracted from Decima by Eben Venter, out now.
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