The statement seemed to overwhelm my grandmother. I thought I saw tears in her eyes. But she soon regained her composure. Then she said, ‘I know her parents are not comfortable with this relationship of yours. But if you can tell them what you’ve just said to me, maybe that can sway them.’
‘Yebo, Gogo,’ Mbongeni said. ‘I would like to appeal to Gogo to go and speak to them on my behalf. I stand by my solemn words: I will pay for Xoliswa’s university education from my own pocket. That’s a promise.’
Emboldened by those words, a few days later my grandma travelled from her own house in Wattville all the way to my parents’ house. When she arrived, I met her at the door. Having greeted her, I called my mother and told her Grandma was in the house. I was as nonchalant as possible, pretending as if I didn’t know why she was here. My mother came to the sitting area. They exchanged greetings in our elaborate way, and started drinking tea. At long last, Grandma got to the point.
‘What is this that I hear?’ she started. ‘My little girl Xoli has been a model child. Girls her age are dropping out of school. They are getting pregnant left, right and centre, yet Xoliswa here has not only finished her high school, she is also without a blemish. Her name is clean. I know that she is the pride of this family. What I want to know, then, is why are you standing in her way?’
My mother said, ‘What is makhulu referring to?’
‘You don’t want this girl to be happy, from what I hear.’ She paused dramatically. By that time, my father had joined them in the sitting area. I sat in the bedroom I shared with my sister and listened to the conversation – the beauty of living in a small house where voices carry easily. My grandmother continued, ‘This Ngema young man wants to make your girl a proper and honest woman, but you two are standing in their way.’
The debate got heated, with my parents pointing out that I was too young for him – he was born in June 1955, and I in July 1962. Not much of an age gap, if you think seriously about it, but my parents had to have a weapon to use against him. The fact that he was an actor also did not do him a favour with my parents, who were career oriented.
‘That man does not have a job, as far as I am concerned,’ said my mother.
‘Have you seen his picture in the newspapers?’ countered my grandmother.
‘My child is not going to eat newspaper pictures of that man,’ my father came in.
‘Not only is he famous, he is on his way to being rich,’ my grandmother argued. ‘You see, not everyone should be a teacher, a lawyer, a government clerk. There are other ways of making a living. One day this young man is going to appear on TV!’
My mother retorted, ‘But still, these play-play things on the stage and on TV do not guarantee you a solid future.’
‘And what about her education?’ my father pointed out. ‘She is still young. She needs to go to university so she can have a solid future for herself and her future family.’
My grandmother cleared her throat dramatically. I could picture her sitting back in the sofa, smiling triumphantly as she said, ‘Now this Ngema young man is going to take care of that. He is going to pay for Xoliswa’s university education.’
‘But, Mama, how would you know that? Can he afford that?’
‘Don’t underestimate this young man. This play of his is going overseas. Everything is confirmed. That’s why he wants to get started with lobola negotiations, so that by the time he shakes those people overseas he will have Xoliswa by his side. That’s what he told me!’
‘He told you?’ my parents cried in unison.
‘Yes, he came to my house. We spoke at length about this.’ There was a triumphant tone to her voice. ‘He is going to pay for Xoliswa’s university. I quizzed him numerous times on that particular aspect during our talk. He told me not once, not twice, but three times that the first thing he would do after they got married would be to take Xoliswa to university. From his own pocket!’
Over the next few days, my parents finally acquiesced and accepted Mbongeni’s proposal. In due course, lobola negotiations started. Things were happening fast, too fast. I was about to be someone’s wife; I was about to go to university; the person I so much loved and respected had suddenly became a celebrity.
Every waking moment I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I had to take things easy. I had to think, seriously think, about what I was getting myself into.
Although I was over the moon that my parents had acquiesced, I thought I should, before we got married, visit Mbongeni’s ancestral home. Just to satisfy myself.
*
It was on a Saturday morning, having packed our suitcases the previous night, that Mbongeni and I boarded a bus to Zululand. The minute I boarded that bus, I knew I was about to enter a new world. There was a sense of foreboding. Fear and excitement. At the tender age of nineteen, I was to be somebody’s wife. Mbongeni Ngema’s wife. I loved him dearly. I respected him. I adored his worldliness. Prayed at the exalted altar of creativity. He made me whole. But I did still not know him. And I did not know the world he came from.
The bus roared to life. Passengers, having settled in their seats, craned their necks out of the windows and said their final farewells to those of their friends and loved ones who were staying behind in Johannesburg. Having in the past travelled a lot by train and by bus, from Johannesburg to the Transkei, where I had gone to school, I was used to covering long distances by public transport. Back then, those long distances – with the bus whooshing past picturesque villages, stopping every now and then to allow a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle to cross the road, negotiating treacherous mountain passes – were almost negligible. That was because they were funfilled as I was always travelling with friends, my age mates. There would be tons of food; people pulling pranks on each other. Boys would be pulling moves on girls. Some of the kids would be drinking – especially the boys – or just telling tall tales to while the time away. But those were days of childhood; I was in the company of my age mates. I could speak my mind, I could tell my own stories.
But here I was that day, on this Pullman bus packed mostly with men. The men were in good spirits. Bottles of alcohol passing from hand to hand, stories being passed around like handfuls of snuff. As the booze flowed, tongues loosened. Voices were raised. There was more ribaldry in the stories being told, some of them so risqué as to be offensive and outright sexist. To hear a grown-up man speaking at the top of his voice, in a bus packed with strangers, about what he was going to do to his wife when he got home was shocking to me. I can take a good joke, a good sex story, but shallow misogyny is not my cup of tea. I was still a young woman, my analysis of society still raw and unsophisticated, but I could tell an instance of verbal abuse against women masquerading as humour. And it never sat well with me.
Later, and with the benefit of hindsight, I would reflect on this bus journey and conclude that it wasn’t just a straight-ahead transfer from point A to point B. It was a metaphorical journey from a world that I’d called home to a world that seemed vaguely familiar to me, resonating as it did with the numerous stories that Mbongeni had shared with me about his part of the country, about his people, about his culture. But soon enough I would discover that the world that I thought I had come to grips with was actually alien to me. To people who did not know him, Mbongeni might have seemed like your stereotypical Zulu traditionalist – one of those Zulus who openly referred to non-Zulus as ‘izilwanyana’ (animals/creatures); those Zulus who, even though they’d lived in Johannesburg for many years, still refused to learn other people’s languages because they regarded them as inferior; those Zulu chauvinists who propounded Zulu physical prowess above all else.
But Mbongeni was not that type of Zulu. He could converse in many African languages. His best friends were non-Zulu – a case in point, Percy Mtwa himself, who was Xhosa. When he was still with Gibson Kente’s cast,