This Book Betrays My Brother Read online

  THIS BOOK

  BETRAYS

  MY BROTHER

  kagiso lesego molope

  ©2018 Kagiso Lesego Molope.

  First published in South Africa by OUPSA, 2012.

  Except for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge support from the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  Cover design by JD&J Design LLC

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Molope, Kagiso Lesego, 1976-, author

  This book betrays my brother / Kagiso Lesego Molope.

  Originally published: Cape Town : Oxford University Press Southern

  Africa, July 2012.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988449-29-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988449-30-2 (HTML)

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O45165T55 2018C813’.6C2018-901435-0

  C2018-901436-9

  Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.

  39 Woburn Avenue (B)

  Toronto, Ontario M5M 1K5

  Canada

  www.mawenzihouse.com

  For my Sisters

  Choarelo, Tumelo, and Lopang

  And in honour of Kwezi, for her bravery

  Attitudes toward other creatures [are] conditioned by one’s level of security within the universe.

  Dr Mamphela Ramphele

  A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son?

  Well now, that’s somebody.

  Toni Morrison, Beloved

  PROLOGUE

  TO UNDERSTAND MY BROTHER'S importance, they say you have to picture a wedding ceremony. Not the one they call a White Wedding, where the bride wears white and only those who are invited attend. No. I mean the big one, the traditional wedding, the one where everyone and their second cousin comes, invited or not. They say you must picture the dancing, the singing, the drinking, the cooking, and the dust rising and falling beneath the many dancing feet as they go up and down the street singing and ululating and inviting neighbours to join them.

  Imagine all this, they say, but at the centre of it all, place a baby. A little baby boy.

  I am told that the news of my brother’s birth spread to the south, to the east, and so far north that it crossed the border and went into Botswana, where it was welcomed joyously by aging and long-lost relatives. My parents received letters and telephone calls from places neither of them had ever even visited. This was not simply a birth, but a great and momentous family event.

  A son, in my mother’s family, had been in people’s wishes and prayers for many years. In fact, if you look back on the family tree you will see that all the males there are spouses, not children born to a long line of matriarchs. You will see that the last time there was a baby boy, he was my great-great-great-grandmother’s brother, and he died in infancy.

  The thing about family history is that it all depends on the person you speak to. There may be agreements here and there, but the story you walk away with depends on what the person telling it wishes to reveal and, perhaps more importantly, not to reveal. I tend to file away what I am told in my head with a little note saying who told me the story. I think they should be labelled like the gospels, as in: The Gospel According to Paul or The Gospel According to Peter. I say: The Day I Started Walking, According to Papa; The Day Basi Won the Maths Prize, According to Mama; or What People Thought When Mama Was Expecting Basi, According to Mama. It helps me make sense of a lot of things.

  This is all a bit tricky when you are a child, of course. But you learn, as I have learned, to pick and choose your storytellers very, very carefully.

  Case in point: a distant, often-drunk aunt whom I only ever met a handful of times, revealed to me that there were boys outside the family fathered by some of the men on the family tree. Children unacknowledged. But she is, like I said, a distant relative. And a drunk. I couldn’t tell you how we are related except that it’s through my father’s side—and this is a large part of what discredits her.

  In any case, you could listen to rumours about unacknowledged babies, but of course you’d be a fool because what you hear outside the family is not true. Let’s call them ditori, a popular way of saying “lies” where I’m from.

  What matters are family stories as told by the women who lived them. What they say is closest to the truth.

  What is not disputed is that my great-great-grandmother had three sisters and four daughters, my great-grandmother had two daughters, and her own two sisters only bore girls. Our mother was our grandmother’s third and final girl child.

  My mother has told me in my aunts’ absence that there were times when her sisters knew—just knew, in that way that only women can—that they were carrying boys. They could feel it. It was from the way the baby kicked, or from how high the baby was lying in the womb, how high they were carrying. “The nose can tell you,” I’ve heard women say. “If a woman’s nose is wider and larger when she’s pregnant, then she’s having a boy. You’re prettier when carrying a girl.” Or: “Look at how sick she is at the beginning. Only a boy makes you this sick.”

  My aunts, according to Mama, would walk down the street and some elderly woman would call out, “It’s a boy! Just look at that nose!” In my mother’s case, as we know, they were mistaken. She knew when she was carrying a boy. She never needed any of the old women to tell her what was going on inside her. “He was so fierce,” she would say with an easy laugh, her eyes going up to the ceiling as if her whole body was transported back to that time, as if she were pregnant again.

  “He kicked when there was noise. He kicked harder when people clapped—always the star. Eish!” she’d say, holding her belly with both hands. “I never slept with him in here. Never slept. As if the waiting was too long for him.”

  The point is, she knew. It was difficult for her sisters, she understood. So many years and so many hopes dashed. That was heartbreaking, she could see, but when it was her turn, well . . . it was her turn.

  After all those decades, after the praying and the hoping and the medicine—“Oh! The medicine!” my mother would exclaim, rolling her eyes to let us know that hers was pure luck and had nothing to do with medicine—the gods finally delivered my brother, Basimane. OK, let me say, it was not just luck. To my mother it was like she was chosen to bear a son. “I always knew it would end with me,” she still says. “When I was growing up I always thought this thing, this curse or whatever you want to call it, was not going to affect me.” She laughs heartily, with much satisfaction, when she adds, “I was right.”

  “Here was that first glimmer of light in a dark cell,” was what my aunt Tumo, who has been a political prisoner a few times, liked to say about Basi’s birth. It’s not until now, actually, that I note the heavy sarcasm in that sentence.

  “This one was strong,” they all told us, a veiled reference to the other one, the one who died mere months after his birth. The one whose name I don’t believe I ever heard because who dares to name a curse? Who would beckon a bad omen?

  No, Basimane was made of everything strong and beautiful and promising.

  So you can say, then, that I am nothing special. This I know—not like a thorn constantly digging into my little toe, but more the way you understand that the wind is colder in the winter and warmer in the summer. It just is that way.

  “You don’t understand, Naledi
,” my mother used to say to me. “It was the happiest day of my life. The happiest day of all of our lives,” she’d add, her left hand sweeping across the room and the gold rings on her fingers catching the light.

  All of our lives.

  It has been understood by both strangers and friends that Basi—as we affectionately call my brother—is as special as raindrops on dying crops. I say this not with jealousy but with apology, really; an honest, heartfelt, and heartbreaking apology coming from a sister’s guilt. It is my way of explaining him and what he did—lest you judge him too harshly after you listen to what I am about to tell you. Or maybe it is my way of apologizing just because I am about to tell you this, my side of the story. What my mother would call my ditori.

  Family history is called that because it is told by the family, for the family. When you recall your relatives’ lives, you are supposed to create beautiful poetry. What you do is turn the light on them and adjust it just so, accentuating their features. You choose the best colours, you paint a halo and then you watch them glow. Perhaps by the end of this book you’ll ask: What’s wrong with you then, telling it like this? Using dim lighting and all the wrong colours?

  My mother asks the same thing.

  My brother, by the way, would never tell, would never have told, if the tables were turned. Telling would not even have been an option for him. He would have taken it to his grave. Ask anyone who has ever known him. Ask his friends, his teachers, everyone. They will all tell you that Basimane—or as his friends lovingly call him, Bafana—is a pillar of loyalty, a rock.

  But, like I said, I am nothing special.

  I should say that all of this is coming up now because . . . you see, I saw Moipone last week. In town, at a Wimpy. Not that I haven’t thought of her, of course. Not that I haven’t spent many nights waking up sweating or lonely days vomiting when the memory of those few weeks comes back to harass me.

  I saw her and I thought, what else? She looked gorgeous. I wondered . . . well, I wondered a lot of things. Was she well? What had happened later? I mean, of course, not only weeks after the last time I’d seen her, but years later. Had there been, for her, even a day when she had not thought about it? Probably not a day, but an hour or two? Does she ever look back and think, gratefully, that she has just passed a whole hour without thinking about it? I’ve had those moments when I find myself laughing and joking and then I laugh and joke some more because I’ve just realized that, tjerr! I haven’t thought about it for a little bit, have I? I’m so thankful in those times, for those minutes that pass without it all haunting me.

  I didn’t know if I had the right to ask. What is the thing to say to Moipone? What do I have the right to ask? And then there’s this . . . connection, this allegiance I’ve always felt with her. Well, it’s quite inappropriate, isn’t it? I don’t know. I think that it may be. My strongest allegiance should be to family, as my mother and all my family have reminded me many times.

  When I saw Moipone, well, the whole thing was very quick and I felt rather uneasy and awkward. My hands and feet felt foreign to me. I fidgeted a bit. The expression on my face was even harder to control. I noticed that her scar is still there and she noticed that I was looking at it, the small mark—which must have been black at first but is now a shiny colour only slightly darker than her skin—that sits on her chin in a curve. A neatly carved birthmark is what you’d think it was if you didn’t know the story. It even looks pretty, if I forget for a moment how it got there. It all got a lot more awkward then, because I was terribly embarrassed that she had seen me staring at the scar.

  Then there’s the thing she said, which wasn’t entirely inappropriate, but rather cruel and all the more shocking coming from her. I mean her, as in the way I remember her. She’s a lot older now. She’s probably not at all the same, given what happened.

  Ugh! Of course, me being the way I am and my dreams working the way they do, I’ve hardly slept well since.

  1

  MARAPONG, MEANING “THE PLACE OF THE BONES” or “where the bones are”—note the subtle difference—is where I come from. “What came first?” people like to ask about the name. Were the bones there first or were the people there first? I still have no idea. I know our people were moved here from somewhere else, a place now occupied by White people.

  Marapong is not the sort of place you stumble upon. To get to it, you have to follow the instructions—if you remember them. Stay on the road and turn at the right places. One arrives there only after fully experiencing that unnerving feeling of being lost in a strange country with a strange language. You begin to come undone, just a little bit. Re-read directions—the major maps are not specific—wonder if perhaps you may have missed a sign while your thoughts wavered. Maybe you think: I should have had my full attention on this, turned off the radio, not reached for another handful of chips. It is as if the plan is to make you think you’ve made some sort of miscalculation. But just as you say your prayers, wipe a damp forehead or shift uncomfortably in your warm seat, then what do you know: you’re there!

  I remember often feeling great relief at the sight of the first houses leading into the place, even having grown up there. Here I’ll let you in on a little-known fact: there’s just one sign that actually says “Marapong,” followed by an arrow and giving no estimation of the distance. You’ll see signs for Rustenburg, which is quite far from Marapong, actually, though Marapong is on the way. Aha! You see? The secret is: the fewer the number of kilometres on the Rustenburg signs, the closer you are to Marapong. I don’t know if it helps for me to add that Rustenburg is actually four hundred kilometres from Marapong, but there you are.

  You see? Knowing a little more about the place: that’s the trick. I know the road from Pretoria to Marapong like I know the inside of my own home because every day we would drive about forty minutes to and from school.

  If you arrive in the early evening you’ll see smoke billowing from chimneys in the distance, marking the end of another day; to your left and right, on the dusty ground, women with children packing up the fruit they have been selling all day at the side of the road. You know a good day by the amount of produce going back into the bakkie. The less fruit and vegetables you see, the better. Then there are the many, many clusters of small houses painted in dazzling colours—the brightest brights—and small windows and chimneys protruding from the rooftops. Taxis whizz by, overtaking each other, anxious to get just one last run before the customers are all home for the night, braking and stopping without warning. You might catch the tail end of a Teddy Pendergrass song as you’re being overtaken by a posh taxi (the sixteen-seater), or it may be Mariah Carey. Or maybe the taxi going by is an old grungy Toyota that seats twenty-four—then, more likely, you might hear gospel.

  What you will not hear from your car is the passenger in the taxi ahead of you yelling, “Mo phasiching!” or, “Mo khoneng!” You’ll just see the abrupt stop, taxi veering off the road in front of you, dust rising, people scattering.

  So, after that nerve-racking drive into Kasi, don’t settle in: be ready for anything. Keep your eyes open and your foot on the brake.

  Buses go at the same speed as the smallest car, and they also go along narrow dusty roads, sending the person on a bicycle fleeing for safety. Best not be behind a bus, then. As you get closer you’ll see children playing just one last game of khati, mothers taking the day’s washing off the line.

  If you’ve arrived in the morning you will see this same scene in reverse: bakkies unloading, the women hawkers laying down blankets for their children and themselves to sit on all day. Up go the large garden umbrellas, down comes the fruit. Passengers are getting into instead of jumping out of the taxis, but the taxis are always, always in a rush in all directions. The smoke from the chimneys is there, but there’s less than what you would see in the evening—a lot of people save their coal and kindling for the family’s evening meal. The women are swee
ping the yard instead of taking down the washing (hanging it up comes in a bit later in the day) and the children, instead of playing, are in uniform with shiny, Vaseline-smothered legs, hair perfectly brushed. They are carrying large school bags and walking to school.

  But come at high noon and you must shield your eyes: from a distance you don’t see the cluster of houses as much as you see the roofs. You’ll understand why people have named this area Silver City. The sun, at its fiercest hour, beats off the iron roofs, creating a glittering sea of silver.

  In the lower end of Kasi you’ll note the bakkie surrounded by people awaiting their weekly supply of water. They carry very large buckets and enormous containers, and they wait for the young man with water to serve them for a price. His face is serious, determined. This is the face of someone who knows the cost of losing his job. The silver sea has no running water, no indoor toilets, only outhouses, no trees, only rocks and dust. This is the lowest part, before the slope rises.

  In all locations—and I think even in the suburbs—wealth follows the lay of the land. The higher you go up the hill, the larger, grander and farther apart the houses are, and the closer you get to cars, running water, and indoor toilets. The boundaries get more pronounced: from wire fences to brick walls, and then the walls get higher and higher and you may start to think you’ve come full circle, that you’ve just driven back into town.

  This is the place of my birth, the stage for all the scenes of my childhood.

  2

  WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, Marapong was like most townships, or as we called it: the location, loc’shin, lekeishene, or Kasi. Then, as now, the end of the school year spells sheer euphoria for everyone. December is like an intoxicating storm, one that we welcome as if we’ve spent the rest of the year looking up and saying rain prayers, waiting for the sky to wail. Have you heard the songs that come out of locations? First of all, any album worth listening to is released in December, and the songs often mention the time of the year. In northern countries songs are about summertime, but here you will hear “December.” One of the more popular songs the year before I left home for varsity starts with: “Hello! Hello, December!”