Title Page
DIALE TLHOLWE
Ancient Rites
KWELA BOOKS
Motto
“Myth does not mean something untrue,
but a concentration of truth.”
DORIS LESSING, African Laughter
Prologue
Prologue
From this place . . .
I came to a curve in the damp, cold wall of the tunnel, to a moment when the roar of the drums and stamping feet seemed to push me backwards, but the urgent, sweaty heat rolling out of the body of the large, over-muscled man behind me did not let me forget that there was no retreat. The only way was forward to the drums.
One more turn and our destination was nearer. I could now hear a low humming swirling just below the drumbeat. Then, as the tunnel narrowed, an inhumanly large eye seemed to come out of the darkness to examine me. I turned away from it, but the giant behind me simply grabbed my shoulders and spun me around like a feather in a high wind.
As he did so, a small boy wearing a loincloth appeared. With slow deliberation he set ablaze the candles that were hanging in recesses cut into the walls, conjuring the full, terrible beauty of a huge female face out of the nothing before my eyes.
It moved and shivered in the uneasy light. It called and repelled. It was frightening, erotic, triumphant and disdainful. But as we moved closer I could also see that the finely painted head covered a massive wooden door.
Even as I realised this the twin sections of the door swung open, bisecting the face and destroying the illusion, and we stepped into an immense cavern whose size challenged belief.
By now, the deep drumbeat and the low humming beneath it had ceased and I could hear a rushing stream to my left. Beyond the stream, I could see what looked like a traditional African village. It was almost too much to accept.
My escort now became insistent, hurrying me forward. Suddenly, a pool of water sparkled ahead of us, with a narrow rope bridge spanning it. On the other side, I could see a large group of people standing vigilantly around a high golden throne, richly draped with animal hides.
Having seen the face on the door I was not surprised to see the same face turning to look at me from the throne. I felt strangely reassured. A feeling of reaching a long anticipated destination trickled into my veins. Her near nudity was both an affirmation and an insult. Pride and insolence were the message of her one small, pointed breast.
I was halfway across the bridge when she stood and everything stopped. The order for silence was unmistakable as it was also beyond defiance.
“All those who assume that all things are settled,” she said, speaking in a rich contralto that swept towards me and upwards towards the invisible roof,
“all questions answered,
all truths revealed,
all histories recorded,
all mysteries explained,
all secrets unearthed,
all wounds healed,
all quests ended,
for all time, are deluded.
Their undoing assured.”
I agreed with everything she said.
Monday
MONDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
A cold day, a cold journey and a cold voice in the vast emptiness between the mind and the place and the moment.
“The main thing is to separate the people you are going to be dealing with. Break the cliques.” He coughed and looked at me out of the corner of his left eye, his right eye remaining steady on the terrible untarred road we were on. He had been on this same subject since we had left Mafikeng two hours earlier. Not an invigorating, cobweb-clearing conversation for a cold Monday morning, especially when held in English – the language that Regional Education Director J. B. M. Tiro insisted on speaking.
R. E. D. Tiro wanted me to be prepared for the situation I was about to be faced with. He did not want me, he said, to arrive with preconceived ideas or to make any hasty judgements. He, on the other hand, was ready to make those judgements for me in a tiresomely oblique manner.
Strange the way some people get old before their time. Take the R. E. D. here. He was not yet fifty, but he talked and behaved like a falling tree that had long passed its point of equilibrium.
“Patience,” J. B. M. counselled. “Tact,” he urged.
“Yes, sir . . . Indeed, sir,” I replied at appropriate intervals as I idly wondered how many people knew what his initials stood for. Julius Brutus Maccabee. Ridiculous! The names some African parents burden their little angels with.
“Separate and watch them. There are those who will help you and there are those who will hinder you.” Another cough and sidelong glance. “They will be watching you too. That’s what they do in these places,” he cautioned. “Personally, I think you’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own. I am only doing this for the people who sent you here. People I respect. But I knew that woman was trouble the moment I . . .” He caught himself and stamped angrily on the brakes.
We had come to a long steep dip in the road that shook the car and Tiro stopped talking to concentrate on his driving. I took the opportunity to ponder the strange circumstances that had brought me to this remote place at the edge of South Africa.
* * *
Woman Educator Vanishes! the headline had screamed.
I read tabloids as my business is tabloidish anyway, but no matter how used you become to the lurid headlines it is always unsettling to have someone you know, or once knew, be the subject of them, however estranged you may have become. You wish that they had conducted their lives more responsibly. You are almost angry with them that they have not.
Mamorena Marumo had had many faces. I had known one, maybe two, or none at all. It is very difficult to love someone and never be sure if the feeling is mutual; to always be a stranger to the workings of their mind. And now, from out of the blue, there she was, demanding my attention again.
The newspaper reports had been vague, overblown and confusing. The media had gone howling into the dark corners of her life, but her parents, Mr and Mrs Marumo of KwaThema, Springs, had been killed in a car accident, and, seemingly, there was no one else to do the wailing in front of the cameras.
The police had made cautious public pleas for information and given guarded warnings to women in the area and the country in general, but, months later, the questions still remained. Questions and more questions. How does a city-bred teacher disappear without a trace in a rural village with a small, semiliterate population? And why had she taken up a teaching post there anyway? Did she have something to hide? And where was her car?
As the weeks had passed, anonymous female bodies had cropped up here and there in the district, but they had always turned out to be someone else. The general opinion was that the bodies were those of prostitutes who serviced the truck drivers who used the road to Botswana. They fuelled a delicious but short-lived panic about a serial killer, but then they had simply stopped appearing just as suddenly as they had first started being discovered.
Finally, the police chiefs and newspaper editors had retreated, turning to more tangible crimes and manageable controversies.
And it was then that the telephone call had come.
A telephone call to my home. A surprising start, as these days I conduct my business via a number linked to the office I share with two other disenchanted souls in Johannesburg. A call on my land line meant that