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

  The other version is that Buyisile was bewitched. There is perhaps some virtue in attributing your father’s psychological complexities to a malevolent, outside agency. For you close ranks around loved ones; the anger you feel is deflected away from your family. It is far easier to love a bewitched than a failed father.

  But there is a price to be paid, and a heavy one at that. If Buyisile’s behavior is to be explained by a surreptitious attack against him, then Sizwe himself is equally under attack. For the aim of the conspiracy is not to destroy Buyisile, but his family. And if this is the case, Sizwe’s unexpected and unlikely success as a businessman is not a boon, nor a piece of good fortune; it is an act of defiance, a provisional victory in a battle not yet won.

  The day the counselors came to Ithanga to test the people for HIV in 2005 was a new event in an old history. The prospect of testing HIV-positive under the gaze of one’s neighbors was to hand old foes a new and potent weapon.

  A Grandson

  Sizwe does not want to live his father’s life; he has spent his early adulthood by turns skirting and ruing the obstacles Buyisile has thrown in his path. But that is not to say that he aspires to cast off and forget all that has been passed down to him. On the contrary: he believes his family landed in trouble because it lost touch with the spirits of its forebears. Buyisile’s problem was not one of rigid rootedness, but the opposite: he was, Sizwe fears, cast adrift from those who preceded him.

  There is a story the Magadlas tell about Sizwe’s paternal grandfather, Buyisile’s father. His name was Vuyani. He died when Sizwe was eleven or twelve. It is not so much a story as a set piece, told over and again at mealtimes in the family rondavel. And it is not so much about a man with his own character and quiddity as a commentary on the history and fortunes of a family.

  The tale is of Vuyani’s death and its aftermath. The old man had been ailing for some time; his family had taken him to hospital three times in the preceding months. Finally, he announced that there were to be no more hospitals and no more herbalists. He instructed that he was to be taken to his home; it was understood that he had decided to begin preparing for his death.

  Vuyani was a patriarch among patriarchs. He was the oldest of three brothers, husband to five wives, and father of more than a dozen children. He thus stood at the apex of the Ithanga Magadlas. He was the one who rooted the family to this piece of ground; he was the channel through which it sought appeasement and protection from its forebears. When any Ithanga Magadla reached one of the four transitional points of life that requires ancestral communication—birth, initiation into adulthood, marriage, and death—Vuyani presided over the sacrificial ritual.

  And so the story of the old man’s death began well. For a family leader’s passing should not come as a surprise. That he called off the trips to the hospital, instructed that he be carried to his deathbed: these things signaled that the patriarch was in control, that he was laying the ground for the delicate period of transition that would begin with his demise.

  On his first night at home he was struck by fits and convulsions that came in successive waves until dawn. When his body finally calmed the family found to its horror that he was speechless. The whole of the following morning, children, wives, grandchildren, and neighbors came to his bedside to try to induce him to utter something, or, at very least, to delay the moment of his death until his voice returned.

  At about midday, without warning, the old man suddenly broke into speech. He summoned his firstborn son to his bedside, and those assembled around him shook their heads and had to tell him that his son was not in Ithanga: he was in Natal. Next he called for his firstborn grandson, and was again told that the man in question was not present.

  Knowing that death was approaching fast, and with no family leader in sight, the old man turned to Buyisile, firstborn son of his third wife, a very poor substitute indeed for a family leader.

  “As from today,” he told his son, “you and your siblings are no longer children. You are old now. At this home you must be united as my children. If you are united, nothing will get between you. If you are not united, there is nothing you can solve. My time now is finished.”

  Buyisile left his father’s bedside and walked alone into the countryside to weep. When he returned, he was informed that the patriarch was dead.

  The calling of the firstborn son and the grandson must have been placed in the deathbed scene retrospectively. For everybody knew that Vuyani’s heirs were not in Pondoland. Both had been lured north to KwaZulu by the ama-Nazaretha, the great Zionist church movement founded in the early twentieth century by the Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe. Shembe’s people believed that their prophet and his successors had been instructed in the ways of purity by Jehovah himself; they lived in exclusive villages of the faithful, and believed the rest of the world to be fatally polluted. Indeed, Nazarethites have at times refused to shake the hands of outsiders, for fear of contamination.

  As far as Vuyani the old Mpondo patriarch was concerned, his firstborn son and grandson had torn themselves from their roots; they had no interest in their home ground, and had lost the knowledge required for ritual communication with their ancestors. When the old man died, the community of living Magadlas was left without a family leader and was thus cast adrift to wander alone, unseen and unprotected by the dead.

  Vuyani was buried in the absence of his firstborn. The trouble began before his corpse had settled into its grave. Minutes after the body had been lowered into the ground, the older of Vuyani’s two younger brothers collapsed in a fit of uncontrollable coughing. He was rushed to hospital, stabilized, and taken home. Days later, he fell ill once more, and the family hired a car to take him to Kokstad, site of the best hospital in the region. He died the following week.

  A year later, Vuyani’s first wife, the mother of the very man who should have been leading the family but was praying with Shembe’s people, fell ill. She too went to the hospital, back and forth, back and forth, and finally died some months later. Her son came back from Shembe’s place to bury her, his first appearance in Ithanga since his father had been alive.

  The following year, the younger of Vuyani’s brothers fell ill and died. Some twenty months had passed since the patriarch’s death, and his entire generation but one had been wiped from the planet. The only person left among his brothers and wives was Buyisile’s mother, a sharp-tongued and bad-tempered old woman who still lives today.

  “My grandfather predicted that this would happen,” Sizwe tells me. “He said that when he dies they will follow him.”

  “That makes their deaths all the more mysterious,” I comment. “It means that his anger and his spite may have been the cause of their deaths.”

  “That’s not impossible. It can happen that he grabbed them as he went. When someone dies, you are never sure why. There are many possible reasons. But the interpretation the family has settled on is that they died because my grandfather was the only one who could appease the ancestors. He was the only one who understood how to do the ritual sacrifices properly. When he died, the family was left unprotected.”

  “You say that is the family’s interpretation,” I reply. “Is it yours, too?”

  He does not answer for some time. We are at the summit of one of Ithanga’s highest hills, looking down into the village. He plucks a blade of long, straw-colored grass and twirls it around his fingers.

  “When my father was making some very difficult decisions in his life,” he says, “decisions that affected us all, I wonder: Was my grandfather there? Was he advising? Or was his spirit no longer in this village? I cannot answer those questions. I don’t know.”

  A Gangster

  That a person makes his own luck is both jarringly clichéd and largely right. The origin of Sizwe’s success was undoubtedly a smile from the gods, but what he did with that smile was marked with his character.

  Some two or three years before I met him, Sizwe heard that a group of serious bird-watchers had hired a c
luster of cottages on the coast some two hours’ walk from Ithanga. He set out before dawn one morning, found them at home eating breakfast, asked them which birds they were looking for, and told them he knew Pondoland’s forests and its animals as well as a human being can.

  They hired him, and within the few hours it took to correlate the Xhosa names of birds against their Latin classifications, they were seduced. He had in his head a taxonomy of every bird in the forest. He could identify each by its colorings, its call, and by its feeding and nesting. He had never opened a bird book in his life. The party of birders believed they had found themselves in Eden with Adam as their guide.

  During their many hours together, the enchanting young man spoke of his plans. He said he had hopes of running a taxi one day, or maybe opening a spaza shop. He was as smitten with the bird-watchers as they were with him. This was the closest he had ever been to white people. Among all the things whites meant to him, they were members of a foreign culture and thus represented the breadth of the world. He could fire question after question at them about their lives, and they replied with enthusiasm.

  They returned to the Pondoland coastline a year later with a hard-back copy of the latest Roberts’ Birds guide, and with another, much larger gift. They had clubbed together and raised money, a lot of money, enough to build an extension to his home, and to fill its shelves with goods. Their gift was nothing less than the beginnings of a spaza shop. He returned to their cottage each day for several days, and together they wrote a business plan and discussed how best to reinvest profits, how to avoid debt.

  He has his mother to thank. It is due to her that he is literate and numerate, and thus capable of running a shop at all. But he also has his own intuition to thank: his certain knowledge that his father was facing backward, that his future would always lie with reading and writing and a knowledge of English, with engagement with the world outside.

  There was a final piece of luck, and it was less of his making. For all the joblessness in Ithanga, the absence of roads, lights, and running water, it remains true that Sizwe was fortunate to come of age during the infancy of his country’s democracy. In 1999, South Africa’s five-year-old government began plowing money into social welfare grants and old-age pensions, and this is precisely the money that found its way to the plastic box behind his counter. I doubt he could have started his shop in the mid- or late 1990s: the village could hardly have supported it.

  IT IS AN unseasonably cold and very wet morning in mid-November 2005. A regular customer of Sizwe’s died during the week: it is necessary that he attend the funeral. He has lent me his spare raincoat and Wellingtons, and we are making a slow, mud-churned course to the burial site.

  The dead man is from a village six miles away, a place entirely devoid of modern infrastructure. At about eight o’clock the previous night, a hearse delivered the dead man’s body to the end of the public road on the outskirts of Ithanga. Four men were waiting to receive it in the howling rain. They transferred the coffin from the hearse to a sled, strung the sled across the backs of two oxen, and began making their way through the pitch dark, up and down ridges and over a stream, to the dead man’s home. They arrived at their destination long after midnight.

  Now, the following morning, we retrace the corpse’s journey, and the mood is light. We are among a party of some dozen or so Ithangans, most of whom drink at Sizwe’s shop. The group has split into twos and threes, and we are followed by the sounds of the conversation of those behind us. I have brought along a stranger, a young woman named Nomalanga from a village some distance away, whom I have employed as an interpreter.

  We arrive at the bank of a normally shallow stream, but the hours of unremitting rain have brought it to life. We sit on the bank, pull our Wellingtons off our feet, and roll our trousers halfway up our thighs. Sizwe is lazy. He has taken off only one Wellington and is hopping across the stream on one leg. He loses his balance, his clothed leg is suddenly thigh-deep in water, and he stands there foolishly in the middle of the stream cursing under his breath. From the bank, I chuckle unapologetically. He looks around in surprise. He is wounded; he has not expected anyone to see slapstick in his misfortune.

  It is now my turn to cross the stream, and Sizwe and Nomalanga make for an ungenerous audience on the far bank. She is talking to him about me in Xhosa. “People think I am his wife,” she says. “I feel so watched and so judged I want to crawl under a bush.”

  I have understood her, and I smile to myself, and Sizwe watches me smiling to myself.

  “You are imenemene,” he shouts from the bank. “Do you know what is imenemene?”

  I shake my head.

  “There is no word for imenemene in English,” he continues. “Maybe the closest word is spy. But spy is still not right. Imenemene is one who pretends not to understand, but he does. And then he goes and uses that information at your expense. Or he laughs at you privately.” He looks down at his wet foot and his dry foot and grins broadly. “I have caught you being imenemene.”

  I look at his face closely to see whether there is any ambiguity there; given what I am doing here in his life, his observation is not uncomplicated. But there is nothing in his expression, just pleasure. He is smiling generously and happily; he is enjoying strolling through the rain and getting wet; he is on his way to pay his respects to a man who walked twelve miles every day to drink his beer.

  THE FUNERAL IS held under the shelter of a large tent, and is dominated by a man who is the archetype of the fervent lay preacher. He wears an old, stained suit and speaks in sharp bursts, a limitless pile of thin parables volleyed at his audience in quick succession.

  “A man who becomes sanguine about his dogs will be bitten,” he shouts in Xhosa. “The dog of a complacent man will be faithful for five years and then turn around and bite.”

  After the service, the congregation files into a large, windowless rondavel, and in the semidarkness we are served plates of meat and beans, and buckets of maize beer. Sizwe’s youngest sister, Yandiswa, lives in this village, and she has given him her six-month-old son to hold. The boy is entranced by the dancing of Sizwe’s dreadlocks. He swipes at them with clumsy fists each time they flash past his nose, and, eventually, he gets his timing right: he finds his fist full of locks and he pulls for all he’s worth. As Sizwe’s face draws closer to his, he shrieks and lets go. Sizwe keeps his face close and giggles. “Mubi wena,” he says. “You are ugly.”

  My eyes meet those of a young man sitting halfway across the room. Momentarily, we are locked in one another’s gaze. He smiles at me and doffs his cloth cap. I am immediately aware that I am to write about him, for he carries himself with a charisma so extraordinary that he appears for a moment to be the only living being in the room, the remainder mere cardboard figures or stage props, there to round out his presence.

  When he leaves the rondavel, I follow him, introduce myself, and hold out my hand.

  “I know you,” he laughs. “I have seen you walking around with your friend Sizwe. I am also from Ithanga. My name is Simlindile.”

  “I’m surprised I’ve never seen you,” I say.

  “I live on the other side of Ithanga,” he says, laughing once more. “So it is not so strange that I have seen you while you have not seen me. In any case, I am a native; I blend in. You,” he chuckles, “you are…well, you stick out.”

  His English is polished, his accent not of this place. It is not just urban, it is middle class: it belongs to a man in a good suit and a tie.

  He is wearing a dull tweed jacket over a black turtleneck sweater. His jacket is fastened, and there is a button missing, in its place a thick safety pin. On his face and in his demeanor there is something I recognize, something I have seen many times before. It is a time-honed screen that bars you from the thoughts he is thinking about you. You are not to know whether you hold any interest to him, but you do know that he has done the necessary calculations: he is not a man given to bouts of spontaneity.

  We are
joined by Sizwe and others, and it is soon time to leave. We do so in a large party, perhaps thirty in all, including Sizwe’s mother, and as we begin walking I notice that Simlindile is not among us.

  “How old is he?” I ask Sizwe.

  “He is younger than me. Twenty-four maybe. Perhaps twenty-five.”

  “Where did he learn his English?”

  “He worked at a big tourist resort down south,” he replied, “far south, out of Pondoland. He was there I think four years. He knows whites very well. He can make them feel comfortable.”

  “What does he do now?” I ask.

  He shrugs and smiles at me. “What do people do in Ithanga?”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, a Sunday, Sizwe and I spend the afternoon in town. We return to Ithanga in the twilight. Two taxis are unloading their passengers at the end of the public road, and the early evening is filled with figures making slow progress up the hill into the village. Sizwe approaches an elderly woman. She is negotiating with a taxi driver, two suitcases beside her and a large bundle over her shoulder.

  “You must visit us often,” Sizwe says enthusiastically. He is warm and attentive. “We are going to miss you. I do not want to bump into you in town. I want to see you here. You must come.”

  She laughs and thanks him and says she will miss him, too. We say good-bye and begin climbing the hill into the village. It is very beautiful at this time of day. The hilltops catch the dying light and are crisp and well formed. But the valley bottom shimmers and blurs; one cannot make out distinct objects, only color: it is yellow and orange, and there are still traces of the late afternoon’s warm beige.

  “Who is the old woman?” I ask.

  “She is a customer of mine. She has been coming to drink since the day I opened.”

  “Why is she leaving?”

  “Because of the gangsters. She has been robbed twice.”