Benedict Wallet Vilikazi

Over the last few months I have reviewed several of the eight volumes in the Africa Pulse series of English translations of classic southern African literary texts. I want now to tackle one more, B W Vilikazi’s novel No Matter When, as this novel turns out to be not just as impressive as I expected, but immensely enjoyable, indeed lovable. Readers may remember my enthusiasm over the love poem “Nomkhosi of My Father” when I reviewed the Africa Pulse poetry anthology; that poem prefaces the novel and guides us into the plot. Vilikazi was a novelist, poet and scholar; together with C M Doke he compiled the authoritative dictionary of isiZulu. In 1946 he became the first black South African to be awarded a PhD; one year later he died of meningitis. Noma nini (1935), the novel translated for Africa Pulse, has to do with the interstitial experience of AmaZulu who have converted to Christianity; as Nkosinathi Sithole, the novel’s translator, puts it in his Introduction, “some people claim to be following the whites but they cannot fit into the lives of whites, and then they say they are black but know nothing about blacks.” Sithole goes on: “Vilikazi removes his story from the oversimplified binaries of [converts] and uneducated, Christian and traditionalist, and creates a space in which choices and agency are shown in their complex reality.” Bhekizizwe Petersen expands on this recognition in the blurb, commenting on “the complicated themes that flowed from the encroachments of Christianity, colonialism and industrialisation in South Africa . . . [the novel is] a meditation on the pleasures, tensions and contradictions that confronted African converts and intellectuals. The politics of change, race, culture, gender and identity are first-and-centre in the text and invite further reflection from contemporary readers” (a point that is made again and again in the blurbs and Prefaces for the Africa Pulse series, reminding us how the present is still shackled to the past). What Petersen has to say is spot on, but does make Vilikazi’s novel sound like a rather severe and forbidding kind of text, whilst I want to emphasise what a delight it is to read. The opening chapters are certainly grim, dealing with the turbulent conflicts and dispersals that followed the Zulu king Dingane’s brutal decrees, further conflict as “Mpande’s ties with the Boers [Mpande being the half-brother of Dingane] accelerated the destruction of many small nations in Zululand”, and conflict between Mpande’s two sons. Whole populations are dispersed, and Vilikazi notes: “in the white man’s land they did not need to live with arms and the spilling of blood.” Thus far the canvas is broad, with group characterisation. There are, though, some vivid, more closely focused episodes, such as a lion hunt: “since they were all young men, they loved to tell stories about their experiences as young men striving to display their bravery, so that they would be popular among girls and be loved by them” (I guess the modern equivalent would be tales of prowess on the football field). And Vilikazi introduces two of his major characters, Nomkhosi (of the prefatory poem), a foundling who is taken in by a Christian mission and becomes a Kholwa [convert], and Nsikana, the young man — an adorable character — who undergoes the heartbreak of falling in love with her. When the more closely focused plot of the novel gets under way, we find there are three major characters: Nomkhosi, that young woman of outstanding beauty, who is a practising Christian; Thomas, a prominent Zulu member of the church, to whom she is betrothed; and the youth Nsikana, besotted with Nomkhosi, who has, shall we say, taken note of him. There is early on a fascinating parallel between No Matter When and Thomas Mofolo’s second novel, Pitseng: the search for true love, published in Sesotho more than twenty years earlier. The Minister at the Mission around which the novel is set is a white Englishman who bears the splendid surname Grout (the cement-like substance used to stick pieces of mosaic together). This is appropriate as he is a would-be matchmaker, just like the Christian schoolteacher Katse in the Mofolo novel. He loves both Thomas and Nomkhosi and wishes them to marry and “expand the work he had started within the black nation.” Nsikana discovers that Nomkhosi and Thomas are due to marry, but that the former yearns for him. So we have a love triangle, intersected by the bond (between Nomkhosi and Thomas) of Christian faith. At the same time, it is clear that Nsikana’s love and respect for Nomkhosi is profound, whilst Thomas views her as a future possession. Nomkhosi is referred to as “this young woman who drove [Nsikana] mad; who closed his eyes so that he could see no good in other girls, and thought about her alone” (I’m sure we’ve all been there). An episode occurs that explains the novel’s title — this is delightful, but I’m not going to do a spoiler. In another equally memorable episode, after years of absence following the dispersals, Nsikana turns up at the family home and his mother — a feisty, short-tempered woman — doesn’t recognise him and berates the ‘stranger.’ Vilikazi keeps the central thematic material bubbling, with references (as in Pitseng) to the “dark ways” that preceded the arrival of the Christian mission — for example, polygamy and medicine murder. (I don’t have a copy of the Mofolo handy, otherwise would quote the line about it being a time of light in the Christianised Pitseng, and elsewhere still a time of darkness). But increasingly his central focus is on the love triangle. The first face-to-face meeting for years between Nsikana and Nomkhosi is fraught, but I promise you, you will devour the remaining fifty pages of the novel without pausing, to see how things are resolved. The very end is both unexpected and beautiful. Chris Dunton