Joel Matinde: ‘We rewrote the entire play ourselves. Workshopped it.’
Kaliban: ‘The New Strugglers—that’s the name of our play group.’
Eric Phala: ‘The New Struggle for a New South Africa.’
Joel Matinde: ‘The New Struggle for the Post-Apartheid, Post-New South Africa.’
Kaliban gestures to the ceiling: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!’
You cannot keep your eyes off the AK, wondering now how you could possibly have mistaken it for the real thing. It is a crude caricature of an AK-47.
You feel, not for the first time in your life, very foreign. Your perceptions are slow as mud.
The woman in the front row hasn’t said a word yet. She folds her arms and watches you with ironic superiority.
‘And you are?’
She does not answer. The men at the back speak for her. ‘She’s Miranda! Miranda!’
‘Prospero the Kapitalist’s beautiful daughter,’ says Kaliban.
‘But in our version,’ says Eric, ‘she marries Kaliban, not the prince!’
‘And what’s your name, Miranda?’
Finally, she deigns to speak. ‘Tracey Khumalo.’
‘Is that Khumalo with a K?’
Your eyes meet. She tosses her braided hair over her shoulder and the beads and bells clatter and jingle. An echo of a past ache inserts itself in the present, cuts and pastes itself onto her, squeezes your heart for a moment, and then is gone.
Beauty and good looks, which are merely accidents of biology, should not influence how you treat a student, or any person for that matter. And why should such an accident of beauty (and beauty is always relative, constructed) elevate a person’s status in the eyes of others? So you refuse to pay homage. Or try not to anyway. But her green eyes follow your every move, like a cat about to pounce on its prey.
‘What have you guys got against the letter C?’
She speaks to you as if you are an idiot. ‘It’s not African.’2
2 The letter ‘c’ in IsiZulu is pronounced with a click, not as ‘see’ or ‘kay’ as in most European languages, hence the comment that it is not ‘African’. This is nothing unusual. Most English speakers don’t like the letter ‘t’. Cockneys and Londoners say ‘w’ instead of ‘th’, and when they can possibly help it, leave out the ‘t’ altogether: ‘writing a letter’ becomes ‘wri’in a le’a’. Americans and Australians, however, prefer a ‘d’ to a ‘t’: ‘wriding a ledder’. But Tracey is probably referring here to the word ‘Afrika’, the name adopted by black consciousness movements during Apartheid South Africa which strove for a New Azania. The ‘a’ and ‘k’ were of course a subconscious draw card. Ironically the word is also spelled ‘Afrika’ in Afrikaans, the ‘language of the oppressor’. The word ‘Africa’ itself is, of course, not African, as Sizwe Bantu tells us in his ‘Notes on Azania’ (see p. 165, Seven Invisible Selves.) Africa is the Latin name for this continent, kindly bestowed on it by Roman imperialists. And if we want to play the reductio ad absurdum game, none of the letters ‘a-f-r-i-c-a’, or even ‘k’, are African either.
You could say something here. But you don’t. ‘So, who’s playing Prospero in your play?’
‘We still don’t have anyone to play Prospero. We need a white man, and no white man has volunteered.’
You have sufficiently regained your composure. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
The men at the back laugh.
You are aware of the baggage you carry, that they carry: that this superficial friendliness is not real, that underneath this banter is a century of resentment against white men, of which you are one. You have to tread carefully. But your instinct is to say to hell with treading carefully. Culture is not god. Culture is a mould growing and feeding on people, a deceptive green furry substance. You believe that underneath all racial, gendered, cultural, religious and political impositions, there is a fundamental sameness, common ground and this is what you need to tap into here. Vive la similitude!
For example, they have an ironic humour you can relate to. Their attitude to the world is wry and sceptical, a familiar stance. The distance with which they measure themselves from others is a trait you might say you had yourself. They exude a dark, restless energy. This is a language you have in common.
You gesture to the six women who sit stony-faced in the middle rows. ‘What parts are you ladies playing?’
Joel answers for them. ‘They’re the chorus. They comment on the play in a unified voice.’
‘The main parts of the play are traditionally taken by men,’ offers Scarface.
‘And what do the women think of that?’
‘They agree with us,’ says Joel.
Tracey twists her body to face the back row and says something in Zulu which is undoubtedly a swear word.
Scarface rises in his chair, but Kaliban pulls him down again.
You cannot keep your eyes off the scar that runs from the corner of his left eye to the right corner of his mouth, his nose split in two by what could only be an axe stroke. You politely try to ignore it, but it is obvious you are uncomfortable. You cannot help wondering: Zimmerlie’s scar, the mutilated kitten, and now this.
They notice, of course. ‘Hey, ushomi,’ calls Kaliban, ‘don’t worry about him. He was in the struggle, and they chopped him.’
‘The struggle?’
‘The Old Struggle,’ explains Eric. ‘Against Apartheid. In detention, they chopped him.’
They are having you on, you are sure. He is far too young to have been involved in any struggle. Apartheid ended in 1994 and this man can be no older than nineteen or twenty. But who are you to argue? He carries his scar like a veteran’s medal.
‘Tell us about yourself, sir,’ says Caesar Langa. ‘What are you doing in eSikamanga? How did you end up here?’
You loosen your tie. ‘Well, let’s say I didn’t really “end up” here, since this is hardly the end … I applied for the job on the internet.’
When Tracey speaks, her voice is husky. ‘Where you from, Dr Turner?’
A year ago you would have been attracted to her, smitten even. You watch her with dissociated fascination. You’ve been here before, and you know it’s treacherous territory, so you just watch yourself watching her. Thank god for scar tissue.
‘From Australia. Melbourne, Victoria. My Ph.D. is in African Literature … well, Postcolonial, Post-Apartheid, Post-Struggle Literature. I studied the great writer Sizwe Bantu … and focused on the African Subject in the novels of Sizwe Bantu.’
‘Who’s Sizwe Bantu?’
‘You’re kidding me? Sizwe Bantu, you know, the great South African writer!’
‘Sizwe Bantu?’ She closes her eyes and taps the pencil on her teeth as if to evoke the vast catalogue of African writers she knows in her mind. ‘Never heard of him.’
Now she is pulling your leg. Surely. ‘That’s funny. He’s in the book that is set for you this semester …’
She shrugs her left shoulder and the shells, bells and bric-a-brac in her hair jangle and tinkle.