Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Read online

  “Then I fell asleep, and I saw my grandfather. And my grandmother, who is still living, was there, too. They were looking for one another. I could see them both, but they couldn’t see each other. Eventually, they met, and my dad was with them. They had a talk together. They were not coming to tell me anything. They took no notice of me. They sat down and talked to each other.”

  “Do you think they were talking about you?” I asked. “Do you think their discussion had something to do with your fight with your girlfriend?”

  “Sometimes I think maybe it does not matter what they were talking about,” he replied. “Maybe it was not him in my dream, just my own thoughts. You can never say. Maybe if he was really with us, there would not be such strange things happening in my family. Like the fact that we got so poor in order for my father to become a sangoma. If my grandfather’s spirit was there in the village, and if he was really watching out for the family, would he really have requested the family to become so poor?”

  IT IS TEMPTING to interpret Sizwe’s story as an allegory. The Western tools of mutilation lying in the morgue have stolen the spirits of the dead. As allegory, the tale speaks so simply and so vividly of a society dismembered in successive encounters with the outside. Foreign ideas and technologies have been agents of corrosion, and no more.

  Yet Sizwe does not mean his story as an allegory. He means what he says: that his grandfather’s skull was smashed open, his brain removed with surgical instruments and thrown in the dustbin. He means that a foreign technology has quite literally removed the dead from the living. Once the story is literal, rather than allegorical, it becomes something quite different, something disturbing.

  It is disturbing because it conjures an atmosphere of bewildered besiegement, of defensive hostility. That Sizwe is a successful businessman, against all the odds, is a function of his outwardness, his willingness to learn and use things foreign, his awareness that if he does not experiment he is doomed. The story of his grandfather’s skull seems to me to come from a dying and reactionary place.

  An image of Vuyani in the mortuary sticks in my head and does not leave. Its violence takes expression in sharp smells and plain images: the clinical stench of disinfectant, the wet, meatlike colors of a disemboweled torso on a white sheet. It is not merely a foreign practice that did such violence to the old man, but medical practice: uniquely intimate, uniquely intrusive. It is a dark tale indeed for a man to be telling himself in the midst of a search for treatment to save his niece’s life.

  WHEN I NEXT see Hermann Reuter, I ask him if he has heard of the business of the removal of the brains and the gutting of the stomachs.

  He has not. But it does not take him long to begin imagining.

  “You’ve never seen a postmortem?” he asks.

  “No, I have not.”

  “A postmortem isn’t complete until you have cracked that skull and taken out the brain. You cut it into slices to see if there’s any hemorrhage or bleedings or blood stoppages or abscesses.

  “It’s quite a procedure to get through the skull. If somebody has seen that once, it’s a very, very strong picture. People work in these morgues who don’t always understand what is done and why. It is they who do it. The doctor doesn’t saw through the skull. It is a proletarian job, done by people who go back to their villages and describe what they have seen and done. They must crack it open and then the doctor looks at the skull and sends part of it away to the laboratory. And the story spreads.”

  “And intestines?” I ask.

  “Intestines I’m not sure. I mean, internal organs do get sent away for pathology tests. I don’t know if sometimes intestines blow up and they just throw them away. Close up the body to make it look pretty. I’m sure sometimes they don’t stuff the intestines back. People are lazy. Doctors are lazy. Postmortem people are lazy. They just throw it away and incinerate it somewhere. These stories probably spread.

  “Very few people actually get postmortemed. But when it does happen, it happens at the morgue. So it happens to one or two people and the story spreads, and soon it’s common knowledge that it happens to everyone at the morgue.”

  VUYANI’S GRAVE LIES among the ruins of what was once his Great Home, about halfway up one of Ithanga’s steepest hills. The family moved from there many years ago; it was high above the nearest source of fresh water, and the trip home from the river was too arduous for all but the youngest and strongest women. If Sizwe had not pointed out the grave, I would not have seen it: a gentle, unmarked mound, covered in long grass.

  We leave the gravesite, and on the journey down the hill, we begin talking about Graeme, one of the bird-watchers who established Sizwe in his business. Graeme is a lawyer. The discussion turns to his education, and then to my education, and together Sizwe and I calculate that between us Graeme and I spent a cumulative seventeen years studying at university.

  “Do you think,” Sizwe asks, “that if a black person reads too much he can go mad?” He speaks with an uncertain voice, as if he is risking embarrassment.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because many black people who go away to study go mad. But maybe it is because people who are jealous of their success bewitch them. Maybe it is not that they have read too much.”

  “But say it was because they read too much—”

  “I want to ask you something else,” he interrupts. “Do you think that if we sent the umlungus back to Europe and kept their wealth here, the wealth would eventually run out?”

  “You want to send us away?”

  “No. I’m just asking. Do you think the money would run out and we would be in trouble?”

  “Where would I go?” I ask. “My grandmother is from a tiny country called Latvia. I have never been there and I don’t speak a word of the language.”

  “I am teaching you Xhosa nice,” he says. “You will find someone like me from your grandmother’s country. But in any case, I am just asking: do you think the wealth would all run out?”

  We walk for a while. He is irritated that I have not answered his question.

  “Even a small tribe like the Mpondos,” I say at last, “even you, we in South Africa need you. If you were chased into the sea we would be in big trouble.”

  By now we are walking on a wet forest path surrounded by trees and undergrowth. Suddenly, he throws his arm across my chest.

  “Mamba!” he shouts.

  I have already begun to launch myself off the path, the adrenaline coursing through my legs, when it comes to me dimly that he has tricked me. By the time I have recovered my senses and regained control over my body, I am three yards back from where we came.

  He is beaming at me and laughing his head off; it is a flat, boyish laugh, triumphant and satisfied.

  Voting Day

  The day after Sizwe wondered aloud what might happen if I and my kind were sent back to Europe was March 1, 2006. In Ithanga and across South Africa, it was municipal government elections day.

  When I arrived at Sizwe’s place early that morning, he looked at me skeptically.

  “Where are you going to vote?” he asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. “My ward is in Johannesburg and I am in Lusikisiki.”

  He took this in and nodded, his disapproval entirely private and barely detectable. He went to stand in the doorway, looked out, and remarked, somewhat absently, that by midday Ithanga would be unbearably hot.

  “I don’t want to talk about the weather,” I said. “I want to talk about the fact that I am not voting. You disapprove. I saw it in your face.”

  “No,” he replied. “It is just something I have noted. And now we move on.”

  He said this with such finality that it seemed rude to push the point.

  We put on our hats and began walking slowly across Ithanga toward the school, where Sizwe was to vote. Already, about a half mile away, we could make out a stumpy snake of voters protruding from the school’s front entrance.

  We met Sizwe’s mother on the way, a
nd she asked me where I would vote, and then we were joined by an uncle of Sizwe’s, who also looked at me askance and wondered aloud where I was going to vote.

  By the time we arrived at the school, I had the sense that my relationship with this entire village had been recalibrated. I was no longer just the one who hangs out at Sizwe’s place, or the one who asks the Zionist Christians about their belief that their prophets can cure illness. My difference was now also marked by my relation to the political order. That I was white and not voting, and they black and en route to the school to cast their ballots, reestablished the meaning of who I was. I felt the presence of “black people’s secrets,” as Sizwe once put it, darting between the polite and masked faces around me.

  In the line, Sizwe greeted an elderly man with his broadest and most generous smile.

  “Molweni Zizi,” he beamed.

  The old man clearly enjoyed the appellation, and soon the two were chatting happily. Once he had left us and made his way to the voting booth, Sizwe turned to me.

  “Do you know what is Zizi?”

  “It is the name you use to address a member of the Dlamini clan.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That is exactly what it is. And do you know who else is Zizi?”

  “Thabo Mbeki.”

  He took out his broad grin once more.

  “You are so right, my man, you are so right. We have Zizis here in this village, and Zizis there in the government in Pretoria.”

  I marveled at Sizwe, at the invisible strand that linked him to the president via the old man, at the bond that had wrapped itself around everybody standing in the line. Democracy had not treated this village especially well. When the adults of Ithanga converged on the school to vote for the first time in April 1994, they had been told, on radio, and on election platforms, that their vote would bring them running water, electricity, proper roads, perhaps a clinic. More than a decade later, there isn’t a soul here who has forgotten that every one of these promises was broken.

  Nor is anybody especially naïve about the character of local politics. When I asked Sizwe whether he knew the ANC ward councilor for whom he was about to cast his vote, he spoke of a well-off man who lived in a smart, brick-and-mortar house about twelve miles away, in a village with electricity and running water.

  “Will he be good for Ithanga?” I asked.

  “He is not smart enough to be good for Ithanga,” Sizwe replied. “If anything is going to happen in Ithanga, it must be negotiated with the chief and two or three other men who are close to the chief. And they will not let anything happen that is not good for them. They will run circles around this ward councilor. It will be too difficult for him in Ithanga.”

  And yet these acidic observations cannot burn the thread that binds the Zizis in Ithanga to the Zizis in the Union Buildings in Pretoria. If there is anyone in this village who did not go down to the school on March 1 to cast her vote, I doubt she would have shamed herself by saying it out loud. It is axiomatic: to be black, here and now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is to vote. And to vote is to vote ANC.

  DRIVING AWAY FROM Ithanga through the dusk on an evening in early March, I listened on the radio to a postelections talk show. A political analyst was accounting for why more people had voted ANC than in previous local government elections, despite the fact that ill-tempered protests about housing shortages and poor services had preceded polling in several towns. “What many analysts don’t understand,” the analyst said, “is that voting is neither a calculus nor a trip down the aisle at the supermarket. Party loyalties are an extension of one’s identity.”

  I had just seen precisely that firsthand in Ithanga. But I had also seen something else. If party loyalties are an extension of identity, there is a flip side: during the few seconds that it takes to cast a vote, many components of one’s identity are suppressed. At some point during the day, Simlindile, who may or may not want to ruin Sizwe and his business, joined the line to vote; and so did the two figures on the other side of the river, who may or may not have been trying to destroy the Magadlas for a generation; and so too did Charlie, who watched his nephew die of AIDS, and then snatched his estate from under the widow’s nose.

  Yet the moment they joined the line they were none of these things. They were shorn of all detail. The particularities that constituted the community of Ithanga dissolved. In the line, everyone was cleanly and simply a black person in early-twenty-first-century South Africa. Thus everyone voted, and voted ANC.

  What is the content of this clean, shorn identity? What is it that effaces the differences between people and draws them to the school to vote? Were I to ask Sizwe, I am not sure how, precisely, I would phrase the question. Yet I think I have already learned some of the answer. I suspect it takes the form of a grand narrative, one that begins with the annexation of Pondoland in 1894, and encompasses the crushing of the great peasant uprising of 1960. It culminates in Mandela’s release, in Oliver Tambo’s homecoming to Pondoland, in voting day on April 27, 1994, when political independence returned after a century-long absence.

  I suspect, too, that the fear of the white doctor’s needle, and the tools of excision that lie in the morgue, are markers in the same narrative. To be black is to have been robbed and violated, and to vote is an act of retrieval.

  It is an immense power and is thus extremely beguiling: a nationalism of such force that on an appointed day it can suspend enmity and reconfigure a community into the shape of a simple line. And yet if this is what binds, if this is what gives a village an image of itself, it cannot be all good. For it seems to me that the empowerment of standing in the line and voting is fused with the disempowerment of suspecting the doctor’s needle as an instrument of genocide. They seem two sides of the same identity, two faces of the same defeat.

  And indeed, it is hard not to recall that just a year earlier this same school was the stage of another public drama. Then, too, many Ithanga villagers lined up outside the school door. They were waiting to be tested for HIV. And if today’s ritual constituted an act of unity, the previous year’s event fingered individual people and separated them out. Those who stayed in the school too long emerged bearing stigmata of shame.

  Nomvalo

  A month after our first trip to Nomvalo, we visited Kate Marrandi again. She had been waiting for us. The moment we entered her front door, she hoisted her rucksack onto her back and handed each of us a banana. Sustenance for our day’s work, she explained. We were to visit six patients, as she called them, a carefully chosen cross-section: the well, the ill, those adhering cheerfully to their treatment, and those struggling against it.

  On the way out, Sizwe and I both admired a guava tree standing in an orchard opposite MaMarrandi’s house. Against our protestations, she opened the orchard gate, made her way to the tree, and shook it with a degree of strength that surprised us both. She returned with two guavas for each of us. We added one to our respective bananas and ate the other on the spot. They were floury inside and tasteless, and when we grimaced MaMarrandi laughed at us and shook her head. Then we followed her across Nomvalo’s maze of pedestrian paths. She quickened her pace as the journey proceeded, and it was not long before we two fit young men were struggling to keep up with her.

  “She is like an ox,” Sizwe remarked, once we had lagged behind far enough to be out of earshot. “You look at her and you think she is fat and old, but she could carry one of us under each arm and she would not get tired.”

  I do not know what our presence meant to MaMarrandi, only that she was clearly very pleased to have us shadow her. And I knew better than to ask, since it was already plain that she did not speak about herself. In any event, the spirit with which she received us radiated a warmth that seemed strangely infectious. As we struggled to keep up with her and spoke behind her back, Sizwe and I were both possessed by light-headed cheerfulness.

  OUR FIRST STOP, MaMarrandi informed us after some twenty minutes of walking, was to be the home of a patien
t who had died. She wanted to introduce us to the dead girl’s aunt and grandmother.

  We entered a good, large home, one with many ornaments, thick carpets, and a tidy lounge suite. A woman walked across the room to greet us. Before I had a chance to introduce myself, a picture on a side table caught my eye. It was a framed studio photograph of a young woman.

  The moment of recognition came like a sharp slap across the cheek. Looking out from the healthy face in the photograph were the eyes of the skeletal being in the pink tracksuit I had seen in the clinic waiting room a month earlier. I swiveled and stared at the one who had welcomed us, and she was indeed the woman who had made her sickly niece laugh in Hermann’s consulting room.

  She greeted us warmly and then turned her back to summon her mother, leaving us alone in this cluttered and ornamented room with her dead niece. The poised and carefully arranged face in the photograph lent every object in this place a terrible heaviness.

  MaMarrandi had settled on a bench adjacent to the lounge suite and was staring blankly ahead of her.

  “How long has she been dead?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow will be three weeks. It has been ten days since we buried her.”

  The girl’s grandmother appeared leaning heavily on a stick. She was ancient and bent over, her torso veering over her legs, and she breathed as if a jumbled collection of instruments and tools was rattling around in her lungs. She walked up to Sizwe and me in turn, grasped our hands, told us to sit, and sat down carefully opposite us, her stick clattering to the floor, the flurry of activity lifting the volume and intensity of her wheezing.

  MaMarrandi smiled at her and laughed.

  “Tell them when you were born, Gogo,” she said.