As a child, 99% of the assaults called corporal punishment that I was subjected to at school left me in tears. Yes, I’m a crybaby. Throughout my life it hasn’t taken much to squeeze my overactive tear ducts. Even as a five-year-old reading my first work of fiction, the Zulu novel Ubudoda Abukhulelwa by Sibusiso Nyembezi, I bawled my eyes out until my elder brother Mazwi kicked me in the nuts and told me to stop wailing, blow out the candle and go to sleep. Now, in my 50s, even beautiful rainbows make me tear up.
However, there was one beating when I refused to cry. Almost every rural village and township has an ugly story about an old woman, likely the victim of age-induced dementia, who has been accused of witchcraft. The street I lived in as a child, in Unit 1 North Hammarsdale, had one. It didn’t help that she was half-blind, had only two teeth and swore like she had swallowed the Irish swearword encyclopaedia. We once witnessed her swearing at a group of men walking from the local beerhall until they blushed.
One of them was the legendary Malum’ Nyamanyama I’ve written about in previous columns. He is the legend whose consumption of the home-made concoction called isiqatha inspired rumours that he could start a veld fire with his pee. He was so shocked by the volley of invective he got down on his knees, yelling “Nkosi thethelela!” (God forgive us!) The woman was probably just lonely, without a family, or estranged from them.
Malum’ Nyamanyama is the legend whose consumption of the home-made concoction called isiqatha inspired rumours that he could start a veld fire with his pee
One block below hers lived a man maybe 20 years her junior. He, too, lived mostly alone, except for occasional visits from a lady who hung around the local bar all day. I confidently bestow upon him the title of sorcerer on account of the darkness of his heart.
The very sight of children playing in the street seemed to make him physically ill. When we saw him approaching, we would pause whatever game we were playing. We’d clear the street, hold our collective breath and avert our gaze for fear of his dark eyes. If you made eye contact, he’d spit in your direction and hiss, “Ungibukani wena mafinyila?“ (What are you staring at, snotface?).
If we were playing football in the street and the ball went over the fence into a yard, we would normally send the most timid-looking among us to enter the gate and politely ask for it back. Most adults would usually throw it back with a lecture about spoiling their spinach patches. But no-one entered his yard. And if he witnessed the ball fly into his yard, he would attack it with a knife as though he had caught it in bed with his nonexistent wife. Yet, paradoxically, unlike the woman with colourful language, there were no witchcraft rumours about him. Go figure.
One fateful afternoon we are playing in a mealie field. We saw Darkheart approaching from a distance, staggering from inebriation. We decided this was an opportunity to launch guerrilla warfare against him incognito in retaliation for all our balls he’d murdered. So we gathered all the pebbles we could lay our hands on and attacked.
The louder he yelled, the harder the pebbles rained upon him. In the end he fled like the fascist army in WW2 in North Africa. Unfortunately one of our fellow combatants, Wiseman, unwisely dropped his jotter on the battlefield. Complete with his name and class number.
The following morning, Darkheart came to our class. That day I took my whipping like Denzel Washington in that notorious scene from his Oscar-winning performance in the movie Glory. I didn’t flinch or rub my burning buttocks. I was that committed to not giving him the satisfaction.
In retrospect, my recollection of these characters is distorted by the prism of my 10-year-old self. I do hope that when I’m half-blind and have only two teeth left I will not be alone. And this makes me question just how much thought we give to the characters who wander our streets in solitude. I’m obsessed with never going to bed without at least one moment of laughter. Most of us have someone to share it with. If, 30 years from now, you find yourself living down the street from me and I’m a sourpuss loner who stabs children’s balls with a knife, please scour the internet for this column and share it with me.
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