The Fig Tree and the Wasp

By the time the half-dozen khaki-uniformed guerrillas got to the veranda, they were unequivocal in the pointing of their AK­47s.The old man was ordered to get up and head for the kraal, where they were going to make an example of him. He obliged and stood up, picking up his Tonga stool. He would not need it, he was told. But by now, having already switched to honest-to-goodness stubbornness, he refused to relinquish his seat. As he was led away, the grown­ups were probably already thinking of the aftermath, of picking up the pieces. My grandmother and mother had long ceased to respond to my little brothers’ tugging and clinging to their frocks. Uncle Elliot, though probably feeling his bowels loosening, still had it in him to order the mujibhas away. They pretended to leave but scurried back to hide behind the log-wall granary, their faces occasionally poking out from behind a corner. They were ready to scamper across the hills to tell all that Munyatheli Mnkandla was finally finished.

After an endless hour during which everyone waited to hear the conclusive crack of an AK­47, we saw the guerrillas head back to the homestead. Their guns were slung across their backs, one of them was carrying my grandfather’s stool while the other helped him totter along on his walking stick. This time they greeted my grandmother as sons of the house, offered their heartfelt apologies and handed back my grandfather’s prison papers which they had requested half an hour earlier. In accordance with custom, the guerrillas introduced themselves, kinship was sought from both sides and it turned out that one of them shared the surname ‘Maphosa’ with my grandmother – she instantly became his aunt. Soon plans were afoot to relocate the pungwe to Mnkandla’s home, but in the meantime the gramophone was taken out of the house and placed on the veranda.

Now, having loosened up, our new­found relations leapt into their dancing personas. On the turntable was a record which would lodge in my memory so that in the years to come, whenever I saw its zebra-emblazoned red label going round and round, I would be spun back to that afternoon. It was ‘Jungle Jive’, the township music hit number by Fast Fingers. Rifles slung across their backs and caps now tucked, half hanging out, into the rear pockets of their combat trousers, each of the guerrillas plunged into the music, quickly falling into rhythm with the constant knock of the snare drum and twirling the lower half of the body in the most suggestive and improper manner. At the front, what looked suspiciously like a small bag of onions jiggled through the khaki trousers, rocking the hips back, while at the rear a cap flapped, mischievously slapping the bum into the other court. The music, with its kwela pennywhistle origins, was not exactly the kind that went with iskokotsha, but its beat worked perfectly – or the combatants simply violated it into submission. And so in the dry, hot, motionless mid-afternoon air of Monde, ‘Jungle Jive’ was humped. Too embarrassed to watch this, my grandmother together with Uncle Elliot’s wife, MaSibanda, and my mother cackled their way to the safety of the kitchen hut. Mnkandla, on his Tonga stool, watched his boys tilling the air as a grin verging on the undignified threatened to undo all his good work of the preceding hour.