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

  He points to a hilltop on our right. It is among the highest in the village and is particularly steep. A solitary round hut sits incongruously near the summit. It appears as if its inhabitants might open their front door, step outside, and roll down the hill.

  “That is her home. It is very isolated at night. Twice, on the night after pension day, very late, maybe one in the morning, they have knocked on her door, and when she opened they pointed a gun at her. After the second time, she said enough is enough. She has gone to live with relatives in Holy Cross.”

  “It was boys from Ithanga?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “She knows them?”

  “Yes. She won’t say who they are. She is afraid they will shoot her if she says who they are.”

  I think of what he has said for a while. We are walking along the side of the valley basin now, and Sizwe’s home is high above us.

  “But, really,” I say, “the whole village must know who these boys are. They are surely boys who have grown up here, who peed in the river when they were children.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “And their fathers cannot stop them?”

  He laughs dryly. “Tomorrow I will take you around the village. We will go to each homestead and see who is doing building extensions. At the end, you will read me your list, and I will tell you that the son of each person on your list is a gangster.”

  “Are you scared of them?” I ask.

  “I am very scared. But so far they only go for old women, for women pensioners who live alone.”

  WE ARRIVE AT Sizwe’s place, take two chairs from his room, and sit in front of his small house, watching the early evening life in the valley below us. I have known Sizwe for six weeks now, and I have still not met Nwabisa, his wife-to-be. She works some two hours’ walk from here—cleaning and house maintenance in the very cottages where Sizwe met his birders—and she leaves at dawn each morning and returns after dusk. This weekend she has gone to visit her family in a village some distance away, and is only returning tomorrow morning.

  I am still thinking of our conversation on our journey from the public road.

  “The man I met at the funeral,” I ask. “What does he do for a living?”

  “Who?”

  “Simlindile.”

  He smiles at me broadly. “Do you know what Simlindile said to me about you last night? He said he thinks your shoes are very expensive. That is what he noticed about you.”

  “He’s…”

  “He is the biggest gangster in Ithanga. It is him who is responsible for my customer running away. He would not have done it himself. He would have sent some younger boys. He would have lent them a gun.”

  “He does the bigger stuff,” I suggest.

  “He knows criminals from all around the area. And he knows big criminals from Durban. He has spent time there. A spaza shop like mine, he can tell criminals from Durban, show them where to go. They come at night with their guns, shortly before the shop is closing. They tell all the customers to get down. Then they go to the owner and they demand money. If he resists, they shoot him.”

  I ask if this has happened before in Ithanga, and he says no, never in Ithanga, but in other villages around here, and that it is a question of time.

  “Your place is very exposed,” I say. “There is no fence, no entrance.”

  “I need a gun,” he replies. “If people walk in while I am behind the counter, there is nothing I can do. But if somebody knocks on the door at midnight after pension day, while I am sleeping, then a gun is useful. Then I can protect myself. I am scared to buy one: if the police come and find I have no license for it I will go to jail. In the meantime, what I do is, a customer of mine has an old shotgun. I borrow it from him every pension day, and then I give it back to him after I have put my money in the bank. It only takes one bullet at a time. It is very slow.”

  He pauses and looks at me severely. Quite spontaneously, we both begin to laugh. We have, I believe, the same image in our heads, of Sizwe taking an old and unwieldy gun and blowing a hole through his front door into the empty night.

  I turn from the view into the valley, which is almost dark now, and look at Sizwe’s home. In the context of our discussion, it now has an air of vulnerability about it. It is not just its humble size. In a broader sense, it is a place of transition, a kind of no-man’s-land. With Sizwe no longer in his parents’ homestead and not yet in a homestead of his own, his two-roomed mud house—his “flat,” as he calls it—is the most visible sign of his transitory status. In a few years, his business will have taken solid root, there will be children about the place, and he will have built a rondavel and another bedroom. But for now that is just a trajectory, an imagined future. His two simple rooms index the fact that he has not yet arrived.

  What comes to me as I look at his home is not so much an image as a sense, a feeling under the skin. It is the night after pension day, I imagine. Under his roof lies several thousand rand in cash that he has collected from his customers during the course of the day, waiting to be banked the following morning. He bolts the door, turns off the light, and he and Nwabisa settle into bed. But they are uneasy. They do not sleep well.

  Those they fear are familiar to them: people they see every day, people, indeed, with whom Sizwe has shared a life since childhood. What frightens them is not just the gun that may be pointed in their faces, but the intent of the one with his finger on the trigger. To be held up at gunpoint by someone you know, or on the instruction of someone you know, is to be invaded in the most exquisitely intimate fashion. Your perpetrator wants more than the money under your bed. He wants something more personal than that. He envies you, resents you; he wants to ruin you.

  It strikes me that Sizwe’s tale is as much metaphoric as literal. He does of course have a specific fear that a specific villager will orchestrate an armed robbery at his home on the night after pension day. But Simlindile stands in for all the watching eyes he believes envy him, and the gun for all the countless instruments of destruction envy may deploy. He fears that he has broken a silent rule: becoming a success in the midst of a generation that is failing has been disallowed.

  Fears such as these, I am thinking, lie in a border zone. It is difficult to judge how much they are the product of an objective assessment of an external threat, and how much they are generated by internal demons. As I am thinking these thoughts, Sizwe begins to tell me a story. He began building his flat about a year ago, he says. He rented a wheelbarrow, handed it to a group of children, and paid them to collect mud from the river. With the mud, he started building bricks. During the same period, Simlindile announced that he too would begin construction on a flat; he marked out a space next to his father’s homestead at the other end of Ithanga.

  Around this time of flat building, one of the bird-watchers who had given Sizwe his wonderful gift, a man named Graeme, appeared in Ithanga brimming with his own ideas about construction. He wanted to build a cluster of cottages right here, just outside the village. No roads, no electricity, no one about except unobtrusive black villagers: there is a pedigree of tourist, he said, who would pay dearly for that. He wanted Sizwe to manage the cottages in exchange for a share—a large share—of the earnings.

  “He came and he spoke,” Sizwe tells me, “and then he came back again with a builder, a colored man called Terence who we in Ithanga knew. Graeme came with Terence, and all the people in the village saw him walking to my place, and everyone, including Simlindile, gathered around. Whites don’t understand that you must not talk about things in front of people, and he started talking about his plans.

  “Simlindile came up to Graeme and introduced himself. He was very charming. He spoke perfect English. He said he had a car. He said he could run a service bringing the tourists from Port Saint Johns, or from the airport at Mthatha. Graeme was very impressed. I said nothing. But I watched Terence, the builder, and he watched me, and we were both thinking the same thing. Terence knows Simlindile. />
  “Graeme did not come back so much after that. I’m sure that as soon as they walked off together, Terence told Graeme all about Simlindile. Graeme never said he had changed his mind, but he had. Because he had learned about the gangster boys in Ithanga, and he knew this was not a place where you can build cottages.

  “In any case, Graeme came that day with Terence, and the very next morning Simlindile came to me and he said: ‘With this Graeme helping you, you do not need your bricks.’ I said to him, ‘No, you are talking nonsense, you cannot have my bricks.’ He kept on speaking about it for a long time. And then he stopped speaking about it. After that, my bricks started to disappear. I went to talk to Simlindile’s father about it. I went to talk to the headman about it. The bricks kept disappearing. Then I thought, no, if I am going to build my own place, and if I’m going to run a spaza shop, I need proper protection. That is when I did a very long trip, to a famous man who lives near East London, to buy muthi, traditional medicine, to protect my place.”

  Listening to Sizwe, I marvel at the clarity and the simplicity of his relationship with Simlindile. Sizwe begins building a new life outside his father’s homestead, and Simlindile literally steals the bricks. The prospect of a business venture comes Sizwe’s way, and Simlindile destroys it. In the narrative Sizwe weaves, Simlindile is not merely a greedy man, not merely an obstructive man: he is pure envy; he sniffs out budding success in the village, and he destroys it.

  Another Shop

  Very early one morning in April 2006, I set off from the room I had rented in Lusikisiki and headed for Ithanga. On the outskirts of the village, my mind having wandered far away, the voices on the car radio long expelled from my consciousness, I came across a scene so out of the ordinary I slowed down and watched. Some fifty paces from the side of the dust road, a procession of a dozen or so people had assembled at the base of a steep hill, and were preparing to make an ascent. They were solemn and stony-faced. One or two turned their heads briefly to look at my car and then ignored me. The postdawn light lent the scene an exaggerated stillness, as if the landscape itself had prepared for the occasion.

  At the center of the group was a man who was clearly very ill. He was swathed in blankets and could not stand on his own feet. Two young men supported him, his armpits hitched over their respective shoulders. As the procession moved, opening a gap through which I could see the threesome unobstructed, it was apparent that they were in fact carrying him; his feet did not touch the ground. One of the young men carrying the sick one was Simlindile. His brow was creased, the expression on his face entirely blank. I also recognized Charlie, Simlindile’s father, whom I had met only once before.

  At the rear of the procession were an old man and a goat. The animal was reluctant. It strained at the rope around its neck. The old man heaved, throwing his entire body into the task, and the goat, like the sick man, was carted up the hill.

  OVER BREAKFAST, I described to Sizwe what I had seen.

  “It is a ritual for Simlindile’s cousin,” he explained. “He lives in East London. They have especially brought him back to Ithanga, to his ancestors, to perform this ritual for him. They are slaughtering a goat up on the hill.”

  “What is the matter with him?”

  “It is believed that the problem is his late wife. She died last year. No sacrifice was made for her after she died. He went on to a new wife, and made no sacrifice for his old wife. There is a belief that if no sacrifice is made for the dead one, her spirit remains trapped. She cannot go to the other world. She possesses her husband and makes him ill.”

  “What are his symptoms?” I asked.

  “I saw him yesterday when he arrived. I know that this man has AIDS. I can see it in the way he is sick. His stomach is running all the time. It does not stop. And there is no pain in the stomach. And he has lost too much weight. He is going to die any day from now.

  “Brian has no father. His uncle, Charlie, Simlindile’s father, he is the one who must make decisions about Brian’s treatment. Charlie says nothing about AIDS. I think he knows, but he says nothing. I do not think it is right. They must talk about what’s really the matter.”

  BRIAN DIED IN his home in East London some three weeks after the ceremony on the hill. His body was brought back to Ithanga in a trailer, attached to a hired four-by-four. He was buried on the grounds of his ancestral homestead.

  The hired vehicle that brought his remains back to Ithanga also carried his wife. She too was very ill, so much so that she was unable to return home after the funeral. A sickbed was made for her in Charlie’s house, and she stayed some ten days, until Charlie finally took her back to East London. I followed these proceedings vaguely and from a distance; I was not at all close to the family, and knew no more than anyone in Ithanga might.

  In late June, some nine weeks after Brian’s death, I returned to Ithanga after a month’s absence. I parked my car where the road ends, and climbed the hill into the village. A new structure stood in the right-hand corner of the clearing at the top of the hill. It was a simple wooden hut, no bigger than a child’s treehouse. The front façade had neither a window nor a door, but a large rectangular hole, beginning at waist height and extending across the breadth of the hut, like the space through which a mobile ice cream vendor serves his customers.

  As I walked closer, it became apparent that the hut was indeed a shop. A kwaito song—kwaito being South Africa’s homegrown equivalent of hip hop—blared from poor speakers, the sound grating and tinny. Clusters of people were dispersed around, some leaning against the wall, others sitting on the grass, most clutching bottles of beer.

  A joyous voice shouted my name, and an arm waved furiously at me from inside the hut. As I approached, I saw that it was Simlindile. He threw his hands above his head, clamped them onto something outside my line of vision, hoisted himself through the hole in his front façade, and dropped lightly onto the grass outside.

  He put his arm around me. His heart was beating fast and he smelled of fresh sweat.

  “Check out my new place, boet [brother],” he shouted, turning me to face his hut squarely. “And check out the people. This is business. Your friend Simlindile is a businessman, a serious businessman.”

  His performance had attracted the attention of his customers, and people glanced at us and laughed. He laughed back, took his arm off my shoulder, pushed himself away from me, grabbed the roof of his hut, and launched himself back over the counter.

  The watchful and deliberate man I had met at the funeral some months earlier had been transformed into something utterly different. He was ebullient, outside his skin, drenched in an uncontained celebration.

  It was a chilly, midwinter day, but he wore jeans and a vest, as if his powerful shoulders were part of the prize, as if they went with the new spaza shop.

  He leaned on his counter, pointed to a piece of flat ground some hundred yards away where two small children were playing, and whistled to them.

  “My children! My children!” he declared with mock earnestness.

  “They are his children,” a woman standing next to me commented. “Their mother was one of his girlfriends until last year.”

  “My children!” Simlindile cried out again. “Everywhere I look, my children!”

  “How many do you have?” I asked.

  “In Ithanga he has three,” the woman replied on his behalf.

  “Three?” Simlindile laughed. “No, man, not just three! I am a playboy. I play without condoms. A playboy does not have three children.” He jumped onto his counter and poked his head out, scanning the entire village with his gaze. “My children are everywhere.”

  “WHAT DO YOU think of the new competition?” I asked Sizwe cautiously when I saw him.

  “It is not competition,” he replied dryly. “None of my customers come from that side of the village. In any case, the danger is to you, not me. I would not advise you to spend too much time at that shop. Something terrible is going to happen there.”

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p; “Why?”

  “There are two reasons. First, because that hut was built by a man called Stars, and the things he builds fall down.”

  I looked carefully at the wall on my right, which Stars had erected after Sizwe grew tired of building his own house. It seemed quite stable.

  “And the second,” he continued, “is that the spirit of Brian is going to do something horrible to that shop. The spirit of Brian is very angry with that shop.”

  Brian, I discovered during the course of the day, was the third spaza shop owner in this story. Only his shop in East London was far grander than anything Sizwe or Simlindile could ever hope for. He drove a BMW and lived in a four-roomed house.

  When Charlie took Brian’s ailing widow home, Simlindile went with him. The two of them moved into the dead man’s house and began selling off his assets one by one. They began with his car, and then moved on to the stock on his shelves. The winding up took less than a week. They left Brian’s widow with some cash, took the difference back with them to Ithanga, and used it to open Simlindile’s spaza shop. A fine inheritance indeed.

  “Brian had two small children,” Sizwe told me, “children who will soon be orphans. Whether they are being looked after, I don’t know. Did Charlie make sure they are still in school and in a good home? I don’t know. I think that Brian’s spirit is very, very angry.”

  Brian’s story was the first I heard, and perhaps the first Sizwe heard, too, of a rich Ithanga man dying of AIDS. His family jostled to be the ones closest to him at the time of his death. And then the flesh on his corpse was there for the eating.

  WALKING INTO ITHANGA the following morning I heard a child’s light footfalls and panting breath on the path behind me. I turned to find I was being tailed by a young boy. He closed the distance between us and danced around me on swift feet, his eyes trained on the ground, guiding his bare soles from the sharp-edged stones and half-submerged rocks that littered the path.