When you are a child, I have come to believe, the world remains what you know. What the teacher shouts out and scribbles on the board is new and exciting, as learning and discovery often is, but it soon finds a home in the imagination, to stay there as something merely imagined. The child is told, for example, that there are animals called tigers that live in India. This the child takes to be true, on trust. But the tiger, so long as the child has not seen it, remains a mystery. India, the country, remains a story. The knowledge, then, from the teacher’s mouth, that our country was Swaziland and that Africa was our continent impressed me. It was new knowledge. But, since I could neither touch nor properly ‘see’ these countries, this new knowledge remained a mystery to me, like the old lie about how babies fell out of aeroplanes. The universe, then, was what I knew — the wattle trees that adorned the hillocks, the gum trees growing towards heaven and dancing in the wind, the Motjane River, smooth-flowing in winter and violently creeping into floodplains in summer. The world of chickens scratching the hard earth for worms, and dogs that yawned during the day and barked at night.

But the earth keeps revolving around the sun, the chickens keep climbing up their perch, and we grow older. A bright child, I did well in the first grade and was promoted to grade two, then grade three, and we were soon taking school trips to all corners of the country. And once in a while we were made to memorise the names of kings who died a long time ago, and the praise names of the current one. In August and September, when schools closed, our sisters went down to the royal kraal in Lobamba to take part in the Umhlanga ceremony; in December it was their turn to watch as the lads went down too to take part in the Incwala ceremony. The country — Swaziland — became something palpable then, something I loved, and to which I belonged.

But then there was soon map-reading. And there was South Africa, a land so vast extending all the way to the Cape. With Swaziland inside, the size of a full-stop, and Lesotho towards her belly, the size of a comma.

It is well-nigh impossible to grow up in Swaziland and not see South Africa as the giant under whose shadow your country exists. The television channels we watch, and relate to, are South African. The Kwaito songs, radio stations and popular songs, the tsotsitaal, and the television soap operas all came to us from South Africa’s Johannesburg. Also, there are not many people in Swaziland who cannot sing the South African national anthem with ease. The writers of the literary stories we were assessed on were South African, as were the poets, and the famous politicians. We wore our shoes and went to the neighbour’s house one night and watched Sarafina, and we cried throughout, for the characters spoke a language like our own, and their pain was ours. We sang along, with feeling, when they sang ‘Freedom is Coming Tomorrow’ and forgot, but for a moment, that we were citizens of Swaziland.

And, anyway, our uncles were in South Africa’s many mines, sending money home at the end of the month. They returned home every December, their pockets heavy with their end of year bonus. Distant relatives came to visit too, cousins who were at South African universities — sophisticates. Thus a longing begins. A yearning for that which, upon comparison, seems better.

It would have stayed like this — a yearning and nothing more — had it not been for my uncle, twenty-six years old at the time, who declared that he was tired of his poverty, and, one morning, woke up, bathed, jumped over the boundary fence separating Swaziland from South Africa, a stone’s throw away from home, then disappeared for three years and came back driving a brand-new VW Citi Golf. It was then that I resolved that a week after writing my exams I would wake up at cockcrow, get my bundle, disappear into the fog and retrace my uncle’s footsteps of many years ago.

But here is the conundrum: some disappear into the fog and emerge with fortunes, while some wander off and fall into a kind of nothingness; and some embrace their native lands and make their fortunes there, while some, though they stay, end up failing and drifting into a kind of nothingness too.

This story was originally published on the FunDza website in June 2017. FunDza is an organisation working towards improving literacy among South African children and adults. An organisation that seeks to cultivate a reading culture too; by producing, and distributing, texts that are accessible to all (especially disadvantaged children).
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How Do You Know if the Grass is Greener on the Other Side?

When I am home, in summer days, and the rains are good and the fields are green, in the early hours of dawn after the roosters have sung their song, my father lets himself into my room and kick me out of bed. Go to the shed and get a hoe, he then says. And the hoe I go and get and to the maize field I make my way. The old man then follows me, on one hand a hoe of his own, and, on the other, a portable radio blaring out a popular gospel song. In the field my siblings have chosen their lines and are already on the job. I choose my own lines and get ready for the old man’s tired story about my laziness and worthlessness. You cannot work; all you know are books, books, and more books, he says. But it is the music I hear more. Defiantly, I opine on the song now playing. I say it is unimaginative and that it is outright boring. I say it may well have been written, and performed, by slow children. I then pronounce that almost all gospel songs are like that. My younger brother, who knows not a thing about silent support, giggles. The old man feigns indifference and starts humming before obstinately singing along.

The only major SiSwati radio station plays nothing but Celine Dion, West Life, and all sorts of songs about God and His son Jesus Christ. Mother, who is fond of the father and son in heaven, picks up the tune and sings along every time the DJ remembers his fellow Christians ‘in all corners of Swaziland’. She sings along, our dear mother, and with a proud face, reminds us that she was ‘born again’ way before there were balls on her chest. It is our sister who has to remember this tale; for she now has mammary glands that force her blouse open and still won’t be ‘saved’. Then my brother, a failed stand-up comedian and a full-time small-talker and a liar, switches off the radio. He tells Mother that Jesus Christ is sick with Ebola and is lying in bed in the heavenly mansion He left to prepare a billion years ago. But Mother, having heard the story since the trouble in Liberia, ignores her ‘sick, sick’ son and switches on the radio again. The song has played and an advert is reminding us of a concert at the Divine Healing Ministries on Saturday evening. R150 a ticket at the gate, the bearer of holy news says.

It has not always been like this. There were times when we were going to grow up and wear shiny silver grey suits. The shirts would be yellow and stiff-collared. Our heroes were gospel music singers, in South Africa and in Swaziland. They wore silk pants that danced in the wind and the shoes were white and had sharp points. Some had teeth that shone with gold foil. And the greasy curls on their heads glistened at each catching of light. We saw them in daily newspapers and in magazines that somehow ended up in our pit latrines. It saddened us to have to wipe off the stinky filth with the pages they were on; and we would not have done it had our mothers known about 2-ply toilet paper.
Our sisters spent their childhoods practising. In bad winter mornings they would gaily repeat the gospel songs popular in those days, and but for a moment forget the frost’s sting on their bare legs. Their role models wore pants that held them tight on the thighs and gave them freedom from the leg down. Hipsters those pants were called. Remnants of an American ’60s movement that never quite made it to the mountains of Swaziland. And their hair — these being an era past the Mandela years when afros ruled — was straightened and pushed backwards and let to hang and dance to the wind’s tune.

Adolescence crept in on us eventually, and with it brought new values and influences. Family fortunes changed, too. My brother became an inveterate liar, my sister chose to not get saved, while Mother’s last born became a vegetarian. I became a reader of The Times of Swaziland and a writer of letters to the editor. Then I became the class-clown and resident atheist. Then I began to wonder if God sometimes takes off his white robes and stand naked in front of the mirror; and if he found his naked figure funny. Mother and Father continue to listen to gospel music. Father’s case is rather strange because he was last in church in 1988. He says Mother should take care of the household’s religious obligations. Church attendance and the rest of it.

Mother does not mind. She prays for us all. But she insists I rejected the God story because I wanted to be ‘a law unto thyself’. I contradict her and say that I rejected the whole business because of the music package it comes with. I also tell her that I am not too crazy about one of the Ten Commandments. Good gods would not outlaw coveting a neighbour’s wife.

But when I have been away from home for too long, and a familiar gospel song in the radio comes in, I wiggle a toe, and remember long gone Saturday mornings. Mother kneeling and applying paraffin-and-wax polish on the cement floor. A Rebecca Malope song playing in the radio. Mother singing along.
I figure that Swaziland’s noise is alright as it is. Gospel music everywhere. In taxes. In construction sites. In revivalists’ tents. In drinking spots. It is the Swaziland in my memory. The Swaziland responsible for the nostalgia and reminisces I enjoy.

But I continue to tell my two cats, at the approach of every Sunday, to not concern themselves with what bearded clerics say on the telly. I show them pictures of church people in the best of Sunday dresses and say, “Don’t be like them and go to institutions once a week to compare clothing”. It is of course an unfair thing to say, and may be unfounded, but what is nuance to cats? I also own a mongrel male dog which I encourage to listen to all the gospel its ear can harvest. It can follow neighbours to church if it wants to. I am hoping that a little superstition will cure its shit-everywhere disease.

I tell people that my preferred noise is the sound of rain falling on a tin roof. And I discovered Frank Zappa in 2013 and feel at home listening to his ‘guitar notes that would irritate an executive kinda guy…’. And I thank the gods sometimes for Bob Dylan who wrote ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ before he jumped into evangelism and gospel music. And, for bicycle rides, I have a collection of the ‘old Kanye’ and a lot of Aesop Rock’s music whose lyrics I hardly understand.

It’s taken me about 3 weeks of careful reading to finish Gillian Stead Eilersen’s ‘Thunder Behind Her Ears’ — a Bessie Head biography first published in 1995.

You know, it’s seldom that one discovers an African writer independently. A teacher, for example, had to tell me about Dangarembga, and about Soyinka, then about Njabulo Ndebele, etc., etc. Their stories are often lumped in with such terrible books, in my opinion, as ‘Heart of Darkness’. And on these writers, whose works were prescribed (both in high school and at varsity), one had to reluctantly write tests and essays.

I discovered Bessie Head on my own. I sort of stumbled on her work (and I stopped to look — and I’ve been looking ever since). I picked up ‘Maru’ from the Mbabane Public Library, a dog-eared copy I devoured in one afternoon. Only the gods — and, perhaps, the librarian in charge of records — know when that happened. 2009 maybe. A week later I was to read her ‘When Rain Clouds Gather’. And my heart was won: not only had I fallen for Bessie and her stories, I’d fallen for Botswana as well, and her people, especially the villagers. It’s not a sort of idealized love I’m talking about. I’m no romantic. I mean an appreciation of seemingly new things, of people and their triumphs and struggles, of an environment foreign and miles away. After all these years, the image of Serowe remains etched in my mind. The landscape. The hot summer sun. The dry and naked earth. Old Batswana men with uncombed hair. The evergreen hedge that the goats never ate. Etc., etc. All told with skill.

Eilersen had to dig deep into Bessie’s fascinating correspondence with friends to get the direction the biography took. Of course, she used her published works, too. But, obviously, the gold is in the letters. Bessie swears in there. She weeps. She laughs. She ponders. She observes. And, boy, does she insult!

Bessie was to celebrate her 49th birthday when she died in 1986. Her death came before she could write the autobiography Heinemann had commissioned her to write. She’d written and said:
‘I have ample material for it in notes, in papers, in letters to private friends. There is no sex and love for these 46 years of my life but rather a rich spiritual discipline which I feel now is finally coming into its own. Go ahead and sign up with Heinemann.’

Well, death came first. But it matters not. Eilersen has been kind in her assessment of Bessie. She did it with the utmost care, and love, and generosity of spirit. I treasure ‘Thunder Behind Her Ears’. It may well be the best book I have ever spent money on, at least up to this point.

You know how official border gates work, don’t you? A bespectacled official tells you to throw your passport into that open hole on the table, as she looks at you from across the glass partition. She picks it up, looks at your picture, at you, at the picture again, then she laughs. If she’s in a good mood, she asks for your boots’ registration number. And you say, “The ones I’m wearing?” to which she says, “You have another pair?” But you say you’re wearing your last pair and she lets you go. So to the zealous bag searchers you go; and you’re relieved when they find no grass in your stuff. Shit, you know, whether you packed crap or not, it may be found in there.

Now, you’re in Mpumalanga province, and you’re seeing the same Acacia trees that adorn the Matsamo you just left in Mswati’s country, and it’s still 10:00am. Who wants to leave for Gauteng cities at so early an hour? No. Not me. So some pebbles you kick. And, hands thrust deep into shallow denim pockets, you proceed to stroll, and to surreptitiously make faces at the children perched on their mothers’ backs. You smile, they smile. You frown, they cry. Jesus Christ! You may as well leave.

Having fastened your boots’ shoelaces you trek, going towards Jeppes Reef. 500 meters into your journey, what do you see? What? Yup. That’s right, an EXODUS. Vans — that is, very old models of Isuzus, Toyotas, Datsuns, etc. — heavy with people, delivering them at the station so they can get onto some taxi going to Driekoppies, Malelane, Schoemansdal, or some other nearby hamlet or town. You know you’re not a cat but you’re curious, so as one of the vans picks up a load going the other way, going to Swaziland, you jump up. But the perspiring driver, wearing his Nike cap, tells you that the fare is R15. You jump up because you have more than that. And to good old sovereign Swaziland you return. Because you’re a fool. And because you’re not as prudent as a cat. You’re just curious.

The people you’re riding with, you learn, are Swazis going home for the holidays. Poor Swazis. Very poor. But a tad better off now. Pleasantries you exchange and your surname you share. One guy suggests that you may be a cousin. Don’t you know Fanyana Mbuyisa? Nope. I never saw the fellow. You really should look him up. You have his nose, you know? No thanks, this one is mine. No. That’s not what I mean. Huh? Never mind. Anyway, eventually you do reach the South Africa/Swaziland boundary line.

Change of tone:

Upon reaching the ‘jump-over’ (Es’cancweni) place, one finds that there is a rank there. And there is trade: people selling water, others begging you to get biscuits and chips, as one helps you exchange Swazi notes for South African ones. And there are people everywhere. It’s difficult to estimate, but I imagine over 2000 people enter South Africa at Matsamo’s unofficial border every day. In the busy season. Many don’t have passports. Some were banned by South Africa’s customs office for not fulfilling certain Visa requirements. And then there are many, many kids. New visa laws make it almost impossible for children to get into South Africa with their parents. It’s all a load of crap, I tell you.

It’s not without significance that the people jumping into South Africa, and a few back into Swaziland, are Swazis, not South Africans. One doesn’t need to see a study to know what it is they are escaping. Poverty. And a whole lot of other bullshit troubles. Many have become residents of the many settlements along the N4 route. One woman with beautiful hair told me that she prefers the Shongwe Hospital in Jeppes Reef to the Swaziland Govt health facility in Piggs Peak. The men are employed as labourers in many of the farms around Malelane, and in construction sites all over Mpumalanga. One Babe Mashaba, eating his boiled free-range chicken and crushing its bones with his teeth to suck in the juice, told me of his mining job in Witbank. And I told him of my uncle who has a family there. He was a teenager when he left Swaziland in the 80s.

But some of the stories are too personal and too harrowing to repeat.

Over a 430 km boundary line, Swaziland shares about 11 border gates with South Africa. I’ve only used two: Oshoek and Matsamo. The latter for the first time this past Saturday. Every day, people cross over into South Africa, and back into Swaziland, illegally. Some are captured and beaten to a pulp by Swazi soldiers. And since I stay near the border, I’ve seen many such cases. They’re tortured and made to march all over Oshoek, Nkhungu, and Ka-Dake. Made to sing. And to dance.

It’s better at Matsamo. It’s the soldiers who monitor the people moving in and out of the country. No one is ever turned back. Except for Oshoek, I don’t know about the other places.

Jesus, I’m rambling. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Swaziland is different things to different people. To some it’s heaven. To many, it is what it is. It’s good old Swaziland. With an economic and political system that’s neither capitalistic nor socialistic. It’s just corruption here and corruption there. And foreign aid everywhere.

There is a Border Restoration Committee in the kingdom. They want to extend Swaziland’s boundary by reclaiming parts of Mpumalanga. The history says the old South Africa stole our land. They seem to be serious about it. The committee members draw a salary every month too. I believe a prince chairs it. Think about that, will ya.

I should go ahead and state that I don’t know what the point of this piece is. I conceived it as a rant. In studying, or just merely observing, Swaziland troubles, I often come out feeling a hopelessness that leaves me confused. I also despair. One often hopes, you know, that things, eventually, will get better in Swaziland. That the king, if he doesn’t abdicate, will at least initiate measures that’ll lead to the fair sharing of power. And that such power sharing — or democracy, if you like — will somehow lead to Swaziland having a better performing economy. Such that people won’t be compelled to flee. They are leaving in droves: those who, with their qualifications, would be valuable to the country’s upliftment; and those who are abjectly poor and desperate. But waiting and hoping that reforms will be initiated, I’ve come to feel, is really like waiting for Jesus Christ of Nazareth to return.

There are so many people with interests who are fine with things the way they are. Traditionalists. Business people. Etc., etc. It’s this impulse, really, that often leads me to thinking that the country’s incorporation into South Africa wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. But I am not naive. There’s a great deal of nationalism in Swaziland. Steeped, deeply, in tradition. Swazis back home are fine with being in their own country. Despite the troubles. And those who flee dream of returning there. They find the idea of having a home in Swaziland appealing. The advantages of incorporation — so many of them — are never really considered.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind incorporation. This despite that I argued with vehemence, in the past, with South African law students at school, telling them that incorporation is a NO-NO. Pointing out that incorporation also means adopting South Africa’s problems. It is true. Incorporation means that as well. But it’s very cynical a defense. The advantages far outweigh the troubles. And, anyway, doing away with the borders will mean many great opportunities for Swazis, young and old, who can never amount to anything in Swaziland’s hidden class system. South Africa will gain about 17 400 square kilometres of land, and a population of about 1.2 million. Plus a whole lot more.

Back to initial tone:

I often think of tossing my Swaziland Identity card and passport out the window. But the trouble is that a tramp may find it and look at my picture. I don’t want people — tramp or dandy — laughing at my official photograph. I’m too solemn in there to be laughed at.