A deceased exile's foresight
14 December 2022
Mphuthumi Ntabeni's latest literary work, The Wanderers (Kwela Books), published in July last year, was nominated in the fiction category of the Sunday Times Literary Awards for 2022.
It is a story set between the repression of all forms of struggle for liberation by the apartheid regime and the recent past of the Zondo Commission, just short of covering the Covid-19 pandemic and the Phala Phala saga.
The narrative commences with Fikiswa "Ruru" Biko, a medical doctor by profession who sets out to trace what happened in the life of her long dead exiled father, Phakamile Maseti, who had declined to return to South Africa with the rest of the exiles in the early 1990s. Conveniently for Fikiswa, her workplace at Doctors Without Borders at Mazimbu Hospital in Morogoro, Tanzania, is quite close to her father's grave at Dakawa, where ANC exiles had been based.
With the help from a friend, Sandi, Fikiswa soon connects with the affable Efuoa, who shared an out of wedlock romantic relationship with her late father. Herself a Rwandan refugee, Efuoa presents Fikiswa with the Pillow Books comprising her father's journal's written by him on the eve of his death. These journals provide Fikiswa the opportunity to look, not only into her father's life journey, but also a look at his soul.
Phakamile Maseti had joined the ANC in exile as a young man and had travelled abroad, serving the struggle in many fronts. Being principled and resolute by nature, he fell foul of the ANC authorities and ended up being detained by the organisation's security wing in Zambia.
On his release he had been sent to Tanzania, where he ended up being a teacher. Disenchantment soon set in with the way the struggle for liberation under the ANC had unfolded and he harboured no illusions of a future of good governance by ANC once in power.
"Freedom Day in South Africa? Freedom from political and social descension into more economic and financial depravity?" he had written. "Freedom is not what leaves the majority of its people unfree." (p.121)
This sentiment from Maseti finds more traction every day now in the hapless way the "majority" is facing challenges of poverty, hunger and unbridled authoritarian corruption.
Another sensible reason to remain in exile had been Maseti's fear that what happened in exile -- comrade killing comrade -- was going to duplicate itself under the ANC rule.
"From the experience l know it is more dangerous to fall into the hands of your own revolutionary comrades than that of the enemy," he'd written. (p.268)
A compilation of magniloquent pieces of writing, Maseti's Pillow Books are a soliloquy par excellence, exuding the nostalgia of a remarkably cultured gentleman. From history to classical literature; from theology to philosophy; and from mythology and actual social events, the narration is oratorical in essence. His daughter Fikiswa had grown up in Queenstown exposed to some classics left by her father, something that brought out the philosophical critic and pragmatist in her as she questions and traverses her own journey in life.
The sombre atmosphere pervasive in Maseti's text is presumably related to the title of the book. "What is there for me?", he asks. "Everyone I know is either dead or scattered around the world with their own lives; my sisters and brothers are also in the diaspora." (p.103)
Are they the "wanderers" in question? Well, Maseti's ancestry is of the Mfengu tribe that lost its land during the Shaka-sponsored wars which brought them misery and strife and led to them to wander the southern parts of Africa. Being relegated to semi-slave status by their hosts, the Xhosa people, they were the first Africans to embrace the occidental culture of the British colonists unreservedly.
Education, especially, was their sole way of exiting poverty and their sense of loss. This historical betrayal by fellow Africans felt by the Mfengu people back then is the betrayal Fikiswa feels from a father who never wanted to return to South Africa and be with her. The betrayal of the struggle felt by her father had condemned him to remain a wanderer.
There is wisdom, love, imagery, rhythm and colour as the book mirrors the historical truths. The author sends a subtle message of the important role that culture plays in the society's consciousness.
The deceased exile Maseti 's Pillow Books give a sharp insight into South Africa 's worsening conditions, as when he wrote: "l also don t want to be part of what's happening in my country -- a glorification of empty freedom."(p.104)
I am in awe of Mphuthumi Ntabeni's skill and originality. Author previously of award-winning The Broken River Ten (Blackbird Books, 2018), he sometimes uses an unconventional way in The Wanderers of writing in the second person instead of the first person, which l found intriguing. But if some of the best songs are sung in the second person, why should I not enjoy this form of art?
This is a book to reflect on.
Luthando Dyasop is an author and former member of Umkhonto we Sizwe.
