Village generosity and other gifts

Cetshwayo Mabhena

DLAMINI was put on trial. In concern, an entire faculty disciplinary assemble was convened to deal with his violent misdemeanours and unsettling tendencies that threatened the very fibre and roots of the learned community.

A series of long but anonymous missives had been received by the departmental and faculty leadership detailing experiences of finer and sensitive academic professionals who could not continue their normal duties under the climate of torture and fear that Siphamandla Dlamini occasioned in the corridors of the university, a real social tyranny was afoot and the powers that be had to do the right thing to end the regime.

In my own strong and very stubborn rural background whose trappings have stuck with me through and through, I sympathised with Dlamini not just because I have a soft spot for cultured Swazilanders and humble rural types who carried their village manners high up university corridors, but that I am always humbled by sincerity and raw generosity of the villager.

For bringing his village warmth and peasant generosity to the cold and dry corridors of this campus Dlamini was to be crucified. The charge sheet was dark and damning. Some members had complained of dislocated shoulders and swollen hands. Others complained of violated private lives and unwelcome surveillance of their families and personal affairs.

Some detailed their suffering of the gaze, a piercing and penetrating eye accompanied by what they believed was an unholy enjoyment of the sight of their bodies, a rude eye that went under the fortresses of their garments to explore the intimate geographies of their bodies.

Young white female interns of the faculty had anonymously described their trauma and the fear even of approaching the work place that was enveloped by the social tyranny of Dlamini, though unstated accusations and intimations of witchcraft itself could be deduced in the tone of some of the anonymous testimonies. What exactly was Dlamini’s crime?

It was bringing to the university his village manners and the true ways of the peasant that can be much unwelcome in a modern setting. A Dlamini greeting, a greeting that I recall from my own village in the Siganda area of Nkosikazi, involves a tight grip of the “victim’s” hand and a rather energetic shake of the entire arm and even body.

As if not only to ask but to test and feel the health of the other. This squeezing and shaking ritual is accompanied by a series of questions concerning the other’s health, family, work and even the weather. It can be a long affair. A true village greeting involves a passionate probing if not an investigation into the life and welfare of the greeted and vice versa.

In the “ hello, hie and bye” cold and dry corridors of the university this greeting is at best found to be strange and at worst it can be experienced as violence. Worsened by his happy, loud and cheerful manner, his poetic play with words punctuated by beery laughs, Dlamini was experienced by some colleagues as a true nightmare.

One rather mean and cruel testimony hinted that in encountering Dlamini one needed a raincoat to protect herself from the heavy rains of Dlamini’s saliva as he questioned, shook, squeezed and laughed at the same time.

My personal perplexity with the tragic Dlamini saga was that a few black sisters and some brothers of colour had added their voice to the loud cry about the terror on campus, the menace of a “nosey and intrusive colleague” whom they found to be strange and unbearable, “what business had he to ask” about their lives and their families, and even to remember and recall names of their spouses and children.

I found these complainants to be nothing but those of our own that have learnt the gentle hug, that deep and soft white “hellooo!” that is accompanied by a quick nod of the head and followed by a fast retreat into one’s own business.

Our own have naturalised the coffee table whispers, restrained plastic smiles and choreographed movements of the body in performance of gentleness and civility. Not so with Dlamini. With his cattle herder spring of the step and a whistle in the mouth he is a true presence of the villager and the peasant on campus.

Even after the stern warning not to make unwelcome bodily contacts in the work place, and his village request that those who did not want to be greeted by him should let him know openly and not write secret accusations, I am told he still screams out his Swati accented greetings and salutations, decolonising the funeral silence and coldness of the corridors, ah uDlamini bakithi!

He closed the hearing himself with the last word, that he will not be taught witchcraft by unhappy whites and whitened blacks who did not know that greetings are a prayer.

The Gifts of the Village in a Stingy World

Not that I am about to romanticise the village and its peasants as a paradise of generosity. No. The village has its thorns, its winters and summers, and true trouble makers. My father Joseph William was a priest and a school headmaster, two offices that give a villager respect among other villagers.

He was called out of his bed in ungodly hours because a dying villager wished to be prayed for. He was also called when babies had been born, to pray for them and sometimes to name them even. My father’s word was an oracle in the village, the gift of old age and his long stay in the priestly and education professions made him everyone’s father. In one cold night my father was called to Tshabalala’s homestead, a cock’s crow away from ours.

It was an emergency. A heavily drunk Mtshengu, for Tshabalala’s are Mtshengus, had started clobbering his entire family from babies to daughters-in-law, scattering them into the bushes in the dark night, all this in his scanty underwear.

Immediate neighbours tried and failed to restrain the knobkerrie and spear wielding village builder and mason with dark rippling muscles accumulated in carrying and laying bricks and cement.

Upon seeing my hurrying and worried father he dropped his weapons of family destruction, apologised for his nakedness and thanked my father for saving him from his family that wanted to murder him, his was self-defence, he explained. Not impressed, my father called him by his father’s name and asked him to live up to the storied name of his ancestors. Weeping and wailing the Tshabalala clan emerged from the bushes, baby after mother, son after sister to explain their ordeal to Mfundisi.

Cornered and overwhelmed Tshabalala dropped his self-defence story and raised another, “Ahyi bona abenzangalutho Mfundisi, abangidelelanga kodwa ngiyazi bazongidelela ngelinye ilanga, ngifuna nje bahlale besesaba,” clearly the rage had gone and not the local brew. Under what influence except umqombothi itself would a grown man clobber his family not because they have done anything wrong but because he believes they will do it in future. This was a good number of years before George Bush’s infamous pre-emptive strikes philosophy.

After Mfundisi’s intervention everyone went to bed but Tshabalala was to avoid the sight of my father for many years in shame.

On a good day Tshabalala himself was not a lost case. Besides the school classrooms he built and bridges that he constructed with other villagers he was a jolly good peasant. On a good day, especially the pay day, after drinking to fulfilment he had a habit of placing his unenveloped wages on the ground for all to see.

When all the eyes were on him he would proceed to sing praises to his wages, praising his money as “umalamulela, umkhululi, umaxabanisa” (the liberator and causer of conflicts) as he danced in a circle around the cash which he worshiped with incantations, whistles and ululations.

He told his cabinet around the calabash that this ritual was meant to protect the money from wizards and witches.

Getting home and struck with drunken village generosity, Tshabalala would distribute the cash among his children, giving the wife the lion’s share and professing his undying love for them all, as their servant. A servant husband and servant father. Sobered up in the morning, knobkerrie in hand, Tshabalala demanded that everyone surrender to him every penny that they “stole” from him last night. So feared was he that the count of cash collected was always to the dot.

But the village never died of its wounds. The thorns it had and its trouble makers became its very decorations. It was not unknown that a total stranger walks into a homestead and never to live until he or she was given status, the elders would citizen the stranger by suddenly discovering that he or she was a relation of the clan and children would be told if she was their aunt or uncle.

Many proverbs and myths circulated that warned against ill-treatment of strangers, chasing them away chased the rain itself from the village and its peripheries. Feeding and sheltering strangers was attending to the gods and the ancestors who were whispered to visit their descendants dressed in bodies of strangers to check if their values of respect and generosity were being kept.

Till death the stranger would remain in this total adoption. That villager who slaughtered a cow would distribute pieces and portions “amatshonstho” (the stolen pieces) to those who helped in the slaughtering, immediate and far neighbours until very little was left for the family itself.

That is how village insurance worked. A cow was slaughtered for the village, even those who did not have cattle of their own. One had to religiously attend the funerals in other homesteads and villages or else risk that theirs would be boycotted. Failure to greet a neighbour or clear refusal to do so was a sign of deep hostility and an act of witchcraft itself. The climax of all enmity was ukungakhulumisani.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected].