Home is nowhere – Part 1

Last week I was talking about different ideas of home, and the relationship we have with home. As a follow-up, this week and next I’m going to review the novel Home is Nowhere by the Zulu author Matthew Jabulani Mngadi. An English translation of this (published 20 years after the appearance of the original isiZulu text) is included in the Africa Pulse series of classic southern African literature. I know some months ago, when I reviewed another Africa Pulse volume, a novel by Benedict Wallett Vilikazi, I said that would be the last of the series I’d look at, but if a chap can’t change his mind, what is the world coming to? Although completed some years earlier, Asikho Ndawo Bakithi was first published in isiZulu by Shuter and Shooter in 1996; for obvious reasons it could not have appeared under the draconian censorship laws of the apartheid regime. The author’s Preface to the novel is remarkable—indeed, like none other I’ve ever read—and for that reason I’ll quote it at length: “After spending a long time writing this book, I set aside three days during which I would finish it. I tried my best to stick to my schedule and wrote until my eyes and hands became tired. I vowed that Friday was going to be the final day. It is a few minutes to ten in the morning and I am almost done. In front of me is a church hymnbook, which I have opened at a hymn that will be sung by the character who is going to face his final day. As minutes draw close to the hour of ten, my typewriter is pouring out words as I describe how the character stands forlorn and helpless as he waits to be killed. Just as I describe the priest’s car as it approaches the scene, weighed down by its prayer-women passengers, there is a knock at the door. The visitors are local prayer-women, clad in full prayer uniform. Astounded, I stop typing and listen to the women as they sing with my two daughters.” (The Preface grows more astounding as it proceeds, without ever tipping over into the maudlin, as it might have done if penned by a lesser spirit). The story opens with a flashback. Zwelisha Dubazana, anguished, physically exhausted, looks back at his life under apartheid: forced removal, passbook restrictions (with Mngadi reminding us how brutal and “we’ll-get-you-anyway” these were), hard labour on a prison farm after resisting deportation; reflecting the novel’s title, Mngadi comments “in this country Dubazana is an alien in all the places where he is supposed to be a resident.” I know of course about the many ways in which Lesotho suffered under the apartheid regime, but reading Home is Nowhere is a good way of reminding ourselves of how fortunate the country was to be part-secured from that barbarity. Dubazana is renting a shack for himself, his wife, son and daughter. Their slum landlord has “a small head like that of a mamba and the eyes of a cat.” This character is borderline OCD and at the same time a glutton and a dagga-smoker. Later, Dubazana’s wife, MaZondi, learns the landlord is a thief, a rapist and a murderer. It becomes clear that in the townships the prevailing ethos, engendered by the savagery of apartheid, is the diametrical opposite of ubuntu. As MaZondi comments: “if you are a tenant, you are devoid of dignity for yourself, your family and whatever else you possess.” Trying to find a safe place, the family flees from one rented shack to another; at around one third of the way through the novel, I began to feel the telling was over-long, but then, the point is that poverty is an absolute grind. The plot takes a significant step forward when the Dubazanas move to another slum and are immediately confronted with a gang who demand to know what is their political affiliation: “We are one of the parties. As you see us here in front of you, we are in the struggle for black people’s liberation . . . you will have to understand that this is a war zone.’” Shortly after, a riot takes place and the Dubazanas are forced to take part in looting and the murder of opposition members (the identity of the warring groups is a matter I shall come back to). In the following chapter a school principal delivers a powerful—indeed, volcanic—speech on the denial of conditions for education and healthy growth (here, unlike elsewhere in the novel, a long speech is what one would expect of the occasion); the school is raided by the authorities and the principal escapes “to the border of a country [Botswana? Lesotho?] where he will board a plane heading to foreign lands.” As violence spirals, Dubazana’s daughter is raped, made pregnant and infected with HIV (much later, we learn that Dubazana’s son has also been raped). The family is taken in by the kindly and wealthy Thabekhulus. Attempts are made by the latter to bond with their house-guests, but these attempts are futile, so deep is the Dubazanas’ trauma. When the Thabekhulus do succeed, their speeches take up to a page at a time. To be concluded Chris Dunton