Primus stove and sun yellow eggs by Candy Bonello

 

This was her land, the land across the Kei river, once the colour of the red coats of British soldiers who slaughtered her forefathers. The Sir Bartle Frere’s, the Cunynghame’s, the Molteno’s.  Many of their soldiers lie in overgrown graveyards at Centani. Graveyards where only white bodies were allowed to decompose under the dark earth that sucked out their souls and spat them into the heavens.  Today the clicks of the Xhosa Nation still resound above their mute bones.

Noayini holds her head high: she has within her the empirical wisdom of her  forefathers. Her long shadow, thin as a stalk of maize, slants to one side. Her face has a relentless aspect of hardship. She the daughter of the great Chiefs, cuts thatching grass, the half moon shadow of her sickle in front of her. She moves with cautious steps, treading softly with bare feet, the Nguni herds roam through the fields around her – they the bloodstream of her land. Noayini looks like the landscape itself, her face scarred with ritual and age; criss-cross paths through dense grass; red slashes of erosion; rivers from the Amatola Mountains, snaking down sandstone cliffs.

She walks to the sea to collect mussels. Her grandchildren follow; a brood of chick around her long wide skirts. They play in tidal pools while Noayini balances on a steep precipice of rocks. Her hunched back, the profile of an oystercatcher wading for food. Afterwards they sit in the jigsaw shade of a milkwood tree. Noayini untying a knotted cloth around a pot of porridge she prepared for lunch. The cattle stand lazily on beach while the sea breeze cools their bodies. The children learn about the things around them. They gather myrtle and milkwood berries and the sour fruit of cat thorn. They know when the fruit falls off the wild plum tree, it is time to plant sorgum. The giant umkhiwane are the sacred shrines of the earth and forest. Their fings hang in great clusters as gifts to the forest creatures.

On the way home she passes by my house to rest, to drink tea, to chat. She sits down on the grass, beaded legs extended, pulls out a long pipe from a fabric bag to puff on while exchanging local news. The children play on the sand road with those of the trading families. They skip and jump and tumble, dance, run and kick balls to each other. A little boy grabs his ball away and says

“We don’t play with kaffirs, my father shoots people like you.”

 

At Christmas Noayini gives me a chicken and four small eggs pulled out of a bag from under her arm. The chicken cackles and scratches and flaps its wings, its Adams apple in its scrawny neck, the lid of a steaming kettle jumping up and down; its bloodshot eyes bulging.

On the day her son died she came to me, pointing at a photograph of him in an identity book. He was her last surviving child. I cupped my hands over hers. I could feel her pain. Her grief poured out of her like a black fog. The thick, dark stuff tightened around her throat, coils of barbed wire choking her.

 

 

On happier days she sat with us, smoke from the braaing meat burning our eyes, eating a meal together before taking her home on my bike. The noise of the engine attracted children like locust swarms that destroy the crops.

“ Isweetie, Isweetie ‘

they shouted. Their small arms reaching out through petrol fumes and dust. Black pigs stuck their snouts into potholes, women heaved bundles of wood on their heads, babies bouncing rhythmically on their backs. A cocktail of smells filled the air: cooking fires and cow dung, cut grass and clay huts. I slowed down for oxen pulling sleighs laden with logs from the Nxaxo forest. Small children rode on the backs while young boys walked alongside, cracking their whips and whistling instructions to the oxen. Skeletal dogs followed at their heels.

From the greenness of the landscape to the merging of sky and sea, this, the place of the Gcaleka people who’s ancient and traditional way of life changed with the loss of their great chief Sandile. The new leaders were men educated in the missionary schools. The chiefs took off their headdresses of otter fur, their strings of necklaces crossing over their chests. They took off their pendants, skirts of monkey tails, bracelets. These were the things of the witch doctors, no longer the regalia of Chiefs.

This dusking land where the dawn inches up and the sea lulls in soft light. Where the songs of the people wake you and you see their white robes floating in the foam of the sea. You see burning candles tossed into the water, their Catherine wheel flames spinning in the charcoal light; you watch offerings of snuff and matches and coins and pumpkin seeds and white beads being taken by the waves;  And the voices wane and there is silence, broken now by a boubou shrike, now by a kingfisher.

 

Noayini came alone one morning and sat quietly smoking her pipe until I noticed her. She was tearful and troubled. One side of her face looked like a snake had bitten her.

I told her I was going to East London the next day and would take her to Frere hospital.

I fetched her outside Top Shop Trading Store, where she was waiting with five other women, all wanting a lift to Centane. I helped Noayini climb into the front with me and the others bundled into the back of the land cruiser, sitting on gas bottles and shouting over the engine noise while waving to everyone they saw.

Noayini didn’t say a word; she just stared out of the window, clutching her bag with both hands. Her eyes telling their own story. She had never been away from her home before. When we reached the hospital, Noayini held my hand tightly, like a small child. The doctor told me she had cancer of the oesophagus. There was nothing he could do: she had left it too long. He said it was quite common among the old women who still smoked pipes. Her throat would swell until she could no longer eat and eventually she would die of starvation. I felt dizzy, the florescent lights began to spin, I had to hold on to the edge of a desk. I thought of the time when my friend died and Noayini gave me a five rand coin. 

‘This is for you, buy something nice to remember your friend, and to remember me, your Xhosa mother.’

I asked the doctor to give me the strongest stuff he had to relieve her pain and he gave me a large bottle of mist morphine, a pink liquid, the colour of rose water. Noayini was waiting on a bench. When she saw me her face lit up. She wrapped her hand tightly around mine; bird claws around my fingers, and followed me out of the hospital, unaware of the ordeal that lay before her.

 

And so my apprenticeship as a lay nurse began. I rode my motorbike up to Noayini’s house each morning to give her morphine. When her grandchildren saw me coming they shouted ‘isithuthuthu, isithuthuthu,’ and ran inside. Speckled chickens scattered, black pigs trotted to their pens. Women waved out of their windows and old men stared in disbelief. Outside Noayini’s turquoise hut a pack of barking dogs snarled and growled and bared their teeth at me. Noayini sat on a chair in front of a hissing primus stove in the middle of the room. Children played around the blue glow while baby chicks pecked at mielie-meal crusted in a pot. She put her hand under her jersey and pulled out a key from around her neck, opened a trunk that held her lifelong possessions and took out the bottle of pink medicine. In the beginning I gave her a spoonful, but when her face was pinched with pain and her birdlike body contorted in agony, I gave her more. The doctor told me to increase the dosage as she got worse.

I started taking ripe bananas to Noayini. I’d mush them in an enamel bowl with a fork until they looked like thick custard and fed her spoonfuls. She could hardly open her mouth. She liked sour milk, called ‘amasi’, and could still manage to get the creamy curds down, but she could eat nothing else. Even mielie meal was too rough for her throat. I took her back to hospital. The doctor said it would be better for her to stay there. I phoned each day and they said she was okay. I spoke to her and she cried. She managed to say one word ‘ikhaya’.

I put the phone down and my thoughts ran through my head like the bolts of lightning from electric storms over the sea.

‘She wants to come home.’

I thought of Noayini in her hut with her grandchildren around her, the people she loved, the smell of burning paraffin, the sound of the primus stove, sun yellow eggs cooking over the flames – of her bed at the side of the door, her black metal trunk at the end of it, with a lock that fitted the key around her neck.

 

I took Noayini home to die with the dignity worthy of her heritage.

She the matriarchal ‘mother of her nation’ was not meant to die in a place bearing the name Frere. This, the man who turned Galekaland into a desolation of burnt-out kraals, smoldering ruins, empty grain-pits. The huge herds of cattle, sacred beasts of the tribes people, he confiscated.  Sir Henry Bartle Frere would not posthumously triumph from taking so great a Gcaleka soul.

 

 

 

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