Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 5

  SIZWE IS DEEPLY invested in living the life of an Mpondo. But when he sees the sort of man into which his father almost made him, he shudders with fear. For by the time he was a boy, the iqaba path to adulthood Buyisile had imagined for his sons was dying. The two pillars on which a youth association boy’s future rested—mine work and a peasant homestead—were being eroded. Men more forward-looking than Buyisile, men better than he at reading the changing times, were sending their children to school. They knew that in the late twentieth century, an Mpondo boy who could not read and write was doomed.

  By the early 1980s, youth associations, once proud bastions of amaqaba values, were hollowed out and rotting. The boys who peopled them were drifting into empty and hopeless futures.

  “They were wasting their time,” Sizwe says when he recalls what the youth associations had become by the time he was old enough to remember them. “They didn’t know what they are doing…They walked all day to a party of another association in a far away area, and then they fought and died. Maybe they were something better in earlier times. But not when I was a boy. Their life was to walk, to fight, and to die.”

  If Buyisile had had his way and kept his sons out of school, that is the fate he would have bequeathed to them. It was their mother who saved Sizwe and Mfundo.

  A Mother’s Boys

  In the autumn of 1991, when his elder sons were fifteen and thirteen respectively, Buyisile was offered a job some thirty miles from Ithanga. He would be going to live on site, he told his family, and he would only return home about once a month. The job was to last for between two and three years.

  Ironically, his work would consist of building a school and then maintaining it.

  Buyisile packed his bag and departed in the early winter of 1991. It was May or June; Sizwe does not remember which.

  “The day he left,” Sizwe recalls, “my mom came to me and Mfundo and she said: ‘You must go to school now.’ We refused. It was the middle of the school year. We had bad memories of arriving halfway through the year. But my mom was firm. She said: ‘No. You must go. And you must go now. Today. I want you to go to school today.’ She forced us, and we went that very day, and we found straightaway that we remembered everything we had learned, even though we had not been in school maybe seven years: it all came back very quickly. And so after a few days we were promoted into the next grade.”

  That they were older than most of the students in their class did not bother them much; it was not unheard of in Pondoland to find teenagers in the second or third grade. The greater source of embarrassment was that they had neither school uniforms nor shoes. Sizwe had not put on a pair of shoes in his life.

  “Twice when I was a boy,” he recalls, “I was bitten on the sole of the foot by a night adder. But my feet were hard like shoes. A herd boy does not bathe. He only swims in the ocean. Feet that have walked everywhere and are not softened by washing are hard, hard, hard. The snakes could not bite through the skin. They bit me, but I was okay.”

  In the first two years after returning to school, the boys spent their afternoons doing the three-mile walk from Ithanga to the ocean, catching crayfish and selling them to the stream of white backpackers who hiked the Pondoland coastline in the summer. With the money they saved, they bought school uniforms, and then shoes. A foot that has never been crammed into a shoe is adorned with impressively splayed toes. Both boys battled to get their feet into size twelves. It took two years before Sizwe’s foot would fit into the shoe size he now takes: a nine.

  Mfundo’s toes never did compact like Sizwe’s. He still takes a size twelve. He is shorter than his older brother, his hair cropped close to his skull, his face plain, its expression often a little diffident. The brothers agree today that during their school days Mfundo was the more shy of the two. It was Sizwe who faced the world, with Mfundo following cautiously in his wake.

  “Who looked after your dad’s cattle while you were at school?” I ask.

  “Many different things came together,” he replies. “For one, with my dad gone, people no longer brought their cattle to us to be yoked. So there were only his cattle to look after. Sometimes we would swap. Mfundo would go to school one day, and I would herd. The next day I would go to school and he would herd. When we reached standard five [the seventh grade] there was no school for us near Ithanga so we had to go and live somewhere else. That was when my mom started helping herd the cattle. It is not something you see a married woman do, herding cattle, but she would help, so we could go to school. She would run the house, and tend to her vegetable gardens, and she would still find time to help us herd the cattle. She worked herself very, very hard so that she could help us.”

  “So your dad knows now it was a mistake to choose cattle over education?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think he can see that he made a mistake. When the school-building job was finished and he came to live with us again he thought he had sent us to school. He didn’t think my mom had sent us. He thought he had let us. He doesn’t understand that we know how we went to school.”

  SO BEGAN SIZWE and Mfundo’s time as hungry commuters, the period during which Jake was to appear in the story Sizwe tells of his boyhood: Jake waiting outside the school grounds in the afternoon, having plotted the course of their next seduction; Jake with money in his pockets, taking the penniless boys to town to buy clothes and food.

  These were very lean times indeed. Once, walking through the center of Lusikisiki with Sizwe, we came across a woman he had not seen since school. She looked at him with wide eyes: “I hardly recognized you,” she said. “You’re so fat. When did you become rich?”

  He is broad-shouldered and sturdy, but he is not by any reckoning fat. Once the woman had left, I wondered aloud what he had looked like at school.

  He laughed: “Mfundo and I were so thin. If I pulled up my shirt and tried to grab some of my stomach in my fist, there would be nothing. There was nothing to grab.”

  Sizwe and Mfundo must have been among the last of the Mpondos to live almost entirely off what their family grew. If Sizwe is right, Buyisile brought little home from his school-building job. What provisions his mother did buy with Buyisile’s remittances were soon spent on the people at home. The way Sizwe remembers it, he and his brother were utterly penniless. When they ran out of food, they walked twelve miles home through the forest, picked the vegetables their mother grew in her garden, and walked through the night back to school.

  It is hard to put together a crisp image of Sizwe during this time. He is an assemblage of paradoxes. Staying in school took monomaniacal determination. The boys may have resented spending the summer months chained to their father’s cattle, but compared to their days as schoolboys, the time in the fields must have seemed luxurious. Their schoolboy lives were stripped bare.

  Sizwe endured years of privation to stay in school, but he did not especially enjoy the work. He was shy, refused to talk in class, and claims that he struggled with his homework. Most of his energy he funneled into sexual conquests. The way he describes it, he and Jake were utterly relentless.

  “Mfundo was shy with girls,” he recalls. “He never had his own girlfriends. But if you were going to spend time with me and Jake, then life had to be about girlfriends, no matter that you did not have your own. So Mfundo would spend his time finding me girls. That was his job.”

  One thing that stays with him from this period is this: his young man’s testosterone dragged him across the countryside at the very time the HIV virus was invisibly banking itself in the blood of Lusikisiki’s sexually active population. What strikes him now is how much pain he suffered to educate himself, and thus how much he sacrificed for the future, and yet, too, how close he unwittingly came to dying young. Jake’s wasting away is the undeniable evidence of his own brush with death.

  Igqira

  Buyisile stayed away for three years. Shortly after he returned, he gathered his wife and children in his rondavel and made an announcement that was to chan
ge their lives. He was not well, he said. And he had not been well for a long time. Since early adulthood, he had been afflicted by a combination of physical ailments and dreams. Sometimes the pain was in his head, sometimes it moved to his shoulders, but always, unrelentingly, there was pain in his leg. The more he tried to treat it, the worse it became.

  He has known the cause of his illness for some years now: his father’s ancestors have been calling him to mediate between themselves and the living, to become an igqira, a diviner. He is by no means the first in his family to receive the calling. His father was called, and used the black medicine to ward off the calling, and both his mother and his mother’s father were called, and they all fought it. But he can no longer struggle against it. It is making him ill. He will soon be unable to work. He knows that if he does nothing about it he will die. He must surrender to it. He must begin the extended period of training: he must become an igqira.

  The family was bewildered. This had come from out of the blue; they had never known Buyisile to be ill. They spent the following days trying to absorb what he had told them, and when the consequences of his decision had sunk in, they walked silently around the homestead as if in mourning. It was nothing short of a disaster.

  The story Buyisile sat his family down to hear was not unfamiliar to them, for it has many of the classic elements of an igqira’s tale. The one who is called usually experiences bodily pain. There are no determinate symptoms, but often the sufferer experiences pain in the shoulders, or the sides, or the upper back. The sickness sent by the ancestors is called inkathazo, which literally means “trouble.” It is pretty much standard that the one who is called will deny that he or she has “trouble,” will run from it, will use the “black medicine” to weaken it. Sometimes she will spar with it for many years and eventually shrug it off. For to become an igqira is a burden most do not want. The training is arduous and horribly expensive. And the life of an igqira is not an easy one: you give over your days to an unfathomably complicated array of avoidance rituals, for much of the taken-for-granted detail of daily life is polluting for an igqira and must be skirted. Moreover, your body is no longer entirely your own; it is a receptacle for messages from the departed: you are often sick and drained.

  Aside from physical ailment, inkathazo is also associated with, although never reducible to, nervous disorder. Most of the amagqira I spoke to in the Lusikisiki area told me one can usually recognize the calling in a person by his behavior. Pointing to her trainee, who was sitting alongside her, an igqira from the village of Ntambalala described her novice’s behavior when she met him.

  “It was most obvious at parties or celebrations,” she told me. “He would be sitting in a room where there is entertainment—singing and dancing—and he would go into deep depression. At times he would wander outside and pick things from the dustbin to eat. At other times, you would address him and he would not hear you. He was somewhere else.”

  This “somewhere else” was somewhere specific. It is understood that these drifting people, present in body but not in spirit, are listening to the imilozi—the voices—of their ancestors, “a strange, whistling kind of language,” writes the historian Jeff Peires, “that only the privileged [can] understand.”

  Among the many reasons Buyisile’s family was shocked by his announcement is that he never, to their knowledge, displayed any of the symptoms of one who has been called.

  “I didn’t understand,” Sizwe told me. “I didn’t understand because he was healthy. He was strong. He was working. He kept on telling us he was sick, but he didn’t look sick. He said he was always suffering with his legs, but he was working, riding horses, walking. It did not make sense.”

  “And his behavior?” I ask. “He was never crazy or…”

  “No, he was never crazy. But who knows? You never know when somebody becomes crazy. But, no, he never acted crazy.”

  UPON ACCEPTING THE call, the initiate begins a long process of instruction at the home of an igqira. His training is meant to accomplish two things. The first is the restoration of the initiate’s health. The longer he has avoided the call, the more severe are the physical ailments of which he must be cured. Buyisile claimed to have been ducking the call since he was a small boy. He was now in his mid-fifties. The other task of training is to teach the initiate to interpret his spirit-guide well, and to learn to withstand the guide’s presence in his body and his mind without going mad. For as a diviner his very being will become a receptacle for the voice of his spirit. To learn to interpret what he is saying is one thing, to keep intact the receptacle one’s being has become is another.

  From the very beginning, Buyisile’s training was troublesome and complicated. He fought with and abandoned one tutor after another. It was to take five years, and a good deal of expense, before his thwasa, his coming out. The problem was one of credibility.

  “My ancestor had told me I must go through the river,” he says, “but my first tutor did not take me to the river, nor the second. You see, there are a lot of charlatans out there. They could not take me through the river because they had not been themselves. They were pretenders. If you have standard six [eighth grade], you cannot take people through matric [twelfth grade] science. That is what some of these people were trying to do to me. I had to go through a lot of things on my own. Luckily, the spirit working with me was clear. I could follow him. I could learn from him without worrying about the charlatans.”

  Nonetheless, even if he would learn nothing from the “charlatans,” he was to invest the better part of his earthly possessions in his training. The average period of instruction is two or three years. The trainee is away from home much of that time, living with and paying his tutor. It is thus a financial and a family ordeal. The initiate sees his family only intermittently, spends a great deal of its resources, and earns none. There are also several ritual sacrifices to be made to the ancestors during training. An initiate can generally expect to slaughter a goat and between two and four cows, the accumulative cost of which can exceed twenty thousand rand.

  Between the various tutors Buyisile abandoned, his training lasted five years, and the cattle he was to sacrifice finally numbered six. Throughout their high school careers Mfundo and Sizwe saw their father only fitfully, and usually in the company of groups of amagqira and their trainees, who would camp out in their home and live off its meagre resources. They also watched their homestead grow poorer. Very little money was coming in. The stock of cattle that they had sacrificed their schooling to tend to, shrank with each passing year. Finally, on the brink of his graduation, what was left of Buyisile’s herd was struck by disease. By the time of his thwasa in 2000 he had two head of cattle and no income.

  Sizwe and Mfundo began their final year of school in January 2001. Sizwe was twenty-five, Mfundo twenty-three. They came home for the April holidays to find their household battling to put food on its table. Together with their parents, they decided it best that they not return to school. They needed to go out and earn some money. Neither of them would ever complete secondary school.

  SIZWE’S RECOLLECTIONS OF how he felt about his father during this period are not what you might expect. He certainly despaired as he watched his family’s assets disappear, and he was devastated to be robbed of his final year of school. But these are not the first things that come to mind when he recalls observing his father become an igqira.

  “Yes, we were worried about what would happen to us,” he says. “But our main worry was him. We were ashamed for him. We did not know what life would be like for him. It is not just that he was going to be a very poor man. When you are training to be an igqira you become like a woman or a child. You do all the things that are supposed to be done by a woman, no matter that you are a man. You have to collect water from the river. That is a woman’s job. You have to fetch firewood. That is another woman’s job. During your training, you wear a skirt like a woman, and you sit on a mat like a woman. Sometimes you see the novices walking from place
to place in their skirts, and carrying their mats under their arms. And when a novice speaks to someone he must kneel down; he must not stand. That is how he shows that he is serving the ancestors. He must kneel down even when he talks to somebody young enough to be his son.”

  ONE NIGHT, SIZWE and I find ourselves among a group of young people around a fire. The conversation is light and is interspersed with laughter. Someone I have never met before is talking of men who have been ruined by bewitchment, men whose families have descended into penury because a demon has gotten inside their heads and caused them to drift and wonder and lose the capacity to make money and to hold on to family assets.

  “The best way to ruin a man,” the stranger says at one point, “is to have a demon disguise itself as his ancestor and pretend he is being called. Then he spends all the family’s money on his thwasa all for nothing. The family is ruined.”

  I examine Sizwe’s face in the firelight. He is expressionless. He does not return my gaze. I cannot help but wonder what he is thinking; he is a son who found his father’s ancestral calling inexplicable, and who subsequently watched himself and the rest of his family fall into poverty. The resemblance between his family and the imaginary family in the fireside tale is uncanny.

  I do not raise the matter with him, and I am thus not sure whether he identified the story the stranger told as his own. But whether he does or doesn’t, the point remains that the tale of how he came to be educated is one in which somebody is vanquished, and the victor must live with the consequences. In the first version, an incompetent patriarch had to be deceived; his wife and children sidestepped his wishes while his back was turned. The achievements of the educated one are thus inseparable from the defeat of his father.