Anyone who has lived through extraordinary circumstances knows all too well that truth is frequently far stranger than fiction.
Mandla Langa is one of these people, which is partly why he uses fiction to tell stories based on truths that many might otherwise not believe.
Langa's new novel, The Lost Language of the Soul, follows the journey of 14-year-old Joseph Mabaso, a child born in exile to parents of Zambian and South African origin, who undertakes a quest to find his missing mother, Chanda.
As Langa notes in the book: "A mother disappearing goes against the laws of nature. Fathers disappear all the time; it's their speciality."
I couldn't go into South Africa because I was in exile, and so I walked
There are many adventures packed into this book - readers will hold their breath for multiple pages in terrified anticipation - but there is also much reflection and a lot of walking.
The walking passages are infused with emotion from Langa's own experience. When his mother died (his grief-ridden memory is shadowed but he thinks he was informed of her death by fellow resistance fighter Moses Mabhida), Langa could not attend her funeral because he was living in exile in Lusaka, Zambia, where he and his boss/mentor Barbara Masekela started what would become the ANC's department of arts and culture. Instead he walked.
NIGHT WALK
"When I got the news, I couldn't deal with it that moment because it's one thing to have a tragedy but it's another thing to have something that you actually can't do anything about, you can't be there.
"I couldn't go into South Africa because I was in exile, and so I walked. I walked from Woodlands in Lusaka, which is where I stayed, right across town to a place. where some friends of ours stayed. I walked the whole night. I did not own a watch then but my friends said I arrived there at around 4am in the morning.
"Lusaka at that time was a place that could be dangerous because of ever so many things, and it has happened in many countries where a person who undergoes a tragic event then becomes a victim themselves. People say: 'But what happened, what was he doing at this place at that hour of the night?' without understanding what he was going through.
"I remember the walk in sketchy detail. I remember being in some kind of blue funk, not really knowing where to go because of the lateness of the hour, but wanting to go to somebody, to speak to one person, or to one family, and I found them."
Langa's heavy walk informs the many walks of his fictional character. "I had to find a way of spreading that emotion out, so I put it on Joseph," he says.
His mother died in SA in 1984. "A horrible year," he says. Five months later, his beloved brother Ben was murdered by young activists acting on disinformation from state forces. This was "fortunate", says Langa, clarifying that it was only fortunate because his mother could not have borne the death of one of her offspring.
PARTINGS AND LEAVINGS
Langa's early history is riddled with movings and partings and leavings and forced removals. And later, in Lusaka, "from 1992 to 1996, I think we moved about 14 times from one residence to another, mainly because of security issues but also because of issues of affordability.
That sense of displacement gave me a psychological entry into the character of this 14-year-old boy who wakes up one morning and finds that every anchor he thought he had has disappeared. He must try to find his parents, especially his mother, also because he has these siblings who depend on him, and he has now been thrown into the role of guardian and provider."
There is a lot more to his new book than displacement and grief, however, and Langa is not the only writer who is focusing on the fallout of a world that seems to have gone mad in nationalistic frenzy.
On Thursday, Abdulrazak Gurnah became the first Tanzanian writer to win the Nobel prize for literature for, in the judges' words, "his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents".
Literary critics agree that Langa is an equally astonishing writer (and let's hope he takes the stage in Stockholm one day).
As happens when authors are in touch with the zeitgeist - for want of a less annoyingly overused word - both Gurnah and Langa have hitched their chariots to similarly pressing themes.
Langa was prompted to write this novel not only by his memories of displacement but by contemporary events that both chilled and sickened him.
"The genesis to everything in this book," he says, "dates back to 2008 and 2015, when there were these explosions in South Africa, these xenophobic attacks, which hurt me immensely, especially when I saw that picture of Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, now known as the 'burning man', who was beaten and set alight and killed in 2008.
"When I saw that, it triggered a number of things. One of them was: 'Here is a person, here are people; they hardly have an identity and for us they are just, you know, alien immigrants and so on and so forth.'
"At the same time there was a young friend of ours who grew up in Mazimbo in Tanzania, whose story informs Joseph's fictional journey in the book. He was telling me this story, which I had to confirm, of so many children of ANC people, who were born in countries where we were hosted - whether in Tanzania or Zambia or as far away as what was then the Soviet Union - and left there.
Some of them were trying to find their South African fathers or South African mothers, but mostly fathers. And that's when a whole lot of different patches of things, of source material, came into my head, and I thought: this is where I could start to write this: what happens to them?"
Walking and thinking and searching are important themes in Langa's body of work. So is home, and belonging, and identity.
It must be quite devastating to be unable to say: ‘This is me, this is where I come from’
"That's a very strong undercurrent, and it's something that comes into full force towards the end of the book," he says.
"One of the major quests for Joseph is to make peace, as it were, or to find some resolution of sorts, because as he gets more and more embroiled in hair-raising escapades, he thinks that maybe there is something that is shadowing him that needs to be exorcised, that has a connection with the land of his father's birth [SA] so that's when he gets in league with South Africans in Lusaka and finds his way to that country, not so much to be in the country per se but to find that ancestral node.
"We have this thing, and I'm sure other cultures have it too, that you want to go to where the umbilical cords of your forefathers or mothers are buried, that presumably connect you with whatever continuities were ongoing even before you were born.
"Having lived in Lusaka and various other places where I have met many people from the African diaspora, one is saved by one thing, and that is the knowledge that whatever happens, wherever you might be, however scared or bereft you might be feeling, in whatever part of the world, you have a place you can call home."
Home means different things to different people. Langa thinks it means whatever we want it to mean, and the search for it takes many different forms.
"A long time ago I remember having a conversation," he says. "I think it might have been with Pallo Jordan, who was speaking about how in South Africa, a long time ago, during one of the world wars, when Ethiopia was invaded by Italy, and which explains how now there is this Christian sect in South Africa who call themselves the Ethiopians and dress in these very colourful robes.
Their adherents, their worshippers, got together in various places in the Eastern Cape and said that they wanted to help the war effort in Ethiopia.
"So they started walking, which was a very ill-conceived plan. Some got lost along the way and this is part of the explanation for why, in various parts of Zambia, there are many different languages."
This was not the only migration that happened during dozens of different wars, all of which add fuel to Langa's theory that almost no person of African origin can claim any "pure" cultural identity. Any attempt to do so causes him distress.
"There is what I would call a 'mixedness'," he says, "which has been made even more poignant - and this is an important point for me - by the intermingling of blood in real terms when it comes to the devastation of those countries who were in support of the South African struggle.
Those places were destabilised and people were killed, together with South Africans. That, for me, is the unstated motif behind the writing of this book; the fact that our destinies are so irreversibly intertwined. This xenophobia is meaningless. It is blasphemy."
TONGUES OF THE HEART
Another leitmotif in The Lost Language of the Soul is language, and how hard - or sometimes easy - it can be to find a tongue of the heart.
While travelling with his best friend, the late poet Bra Willie Kgositsile, Langa had a visceral experience of things that both divide and connect us.
"We travelled to Luanda from Lusaka and then got into a boat and travelled to Congo Brazzaville," he recalls.
"And there was a moment when we recognised in each other the strangeness of the place in which we found ourselves but we were able to talk and look at some of the other people - African-Americans for instance - who might find a way of claiming that their ancestors came from The Gambia and so on - you know, the whole roots thing - but viscerally, it must be quite devastating to be unable to say: 'This is me, this is where I come from'.
"It's a question of identity. I suppose that's largely what would have motivated somebody like Joseph. What that place where you find yourself turns out to be is another story, but at least you might say to yourself: 'I have reached some destination, the thing I have always been looking for'."
Langa's novel is an epic and deeply emotional adventure story that must be read to be appreciated. Langa himself must be met to be truly appreciated.
They say you should never meet your heroes, and sometimes they (whoever "they" might be) are right, but in this case they were wrong.
They also say a journalist should never insert herself into any article, especially one about a hero, but this story would not be complete without mentioning how Mandla Langa - cultural activist, poet, novelist, biographer and all-round extraordinary human being - asked if I wanted warm milk with the excellent pot of coffee he'd just brewed. How many literary giants go to such trouble for their guests?
I had cold milk, and will always remember it as the best cup of coffee I've ever had.
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