The Fig Tree and the Wasp

The story has become tangled up with time, but family lore – variations of the story as told by Elliot – has it that the old man had played a high-stakes game that could easily have blown up in his face had his nerve failed. While being led to the tree that had been chosen as the site of his execution, his opening gambit had been to ask the guerrillas who their commander, or ‘cwommander’ as he pronounced it, was. He wanted to talk to their cwommander because now that they were executing him on the basis of malevolent hearsay, tomorrow the same hearsay would lead them unwittingly to execute their commander-in-chief, Joshua Nkomo, whom ‘… I left behind in jail paying a high price for you boys’.

Of course he had not been in the same jail as Nkomo, but that revelation and what must have been a perplexing absence of fear on the face of this pipe-sucking old fuck­up on his Tonga stool threw the would-be executioners off. The guerrillas lost their poise and said they had left their commander back where the pungwe was to be held. And so Mnkandla, a spirit medium and herbalist, reached for the initiative in the manner of a visiting grandfather plucking his expensive hat off the head of a badly brought up grandson who had snatched it off the old knee to start the game. Deploying the full oratory force of a venerable custodian of tradition, he put it to them that since their cwommander was on the other side of the village, he, Munyatheli Mnkandla, was by default presently their cwommander and was ordering them to leave a couple of their fellows guarding him, if need be, and to go and bring their cwommander here. Now! Soon, the law was laid down and an ethical order that had existed a decade earlier reimposed: freedom fighters operate in the area by consent, they do not make demands for food but accept whatever people can afford. And so followed the process of verifying who this peculiar old man was, culminating with the boys humping a kwela number in the screaming daylight.

Later that same year, soon after a ceasefire had been declared, we again visited my grandparents during the school holidays.

I had accompanied Cwommander Mnkandla and his smoking pipe on a walk around the village when we were called over by a group of guerrillas. Obviously still distrustful of the ceasefire, they were concealed behind thick foliage over which the canopy of a gnarly old fig tree hung still, swarmed by fig wasps and with the aroma of overripe figs tangible a good distance away. The guerrillas started off as expected: Is it OK on that side of the village? Who are those people who spent the night at the Moyo family homestead? As had now become customary, joviality followed: Come on, spare us some of that tobacco of yours, old man. My grandfather could command from the guerrillas a degree of the deference reserved for elders but not enough to stop them getting distracted by the occasional maiden strolling serenely down the path with a bucket of water or firewood on her head, pretending to have seen nothing because to see something then had come to mean being a potential witness, a burden that still held the whiff of death. On the part of the guerrillas, probably sex-starved and certainly driven by procreative urges after years of living amid death, the temptation to wolf-whistle was apparent but resisted – carelessness could see comrades perish.