If You Keep Digging Read online

  If You Keep Digging

  If You Keep Digging

  Stories

  Keletso Mopai

  First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2019

  10 Orange Street

  Sunnyside

  Auckland Park 2092

  South Africa

  +2711 628 3200

  www.jacana.co.za

  © Keletso Mopai, 2019

  All rights reserved.

  d-PDF 978-1-928337-85-0

  ePUB 978-1-928337-86-7

  mobi file 978-1-928337-87-4

  Cover design by Maggie Davey

  Cover artwork © Sindiso Khumalo

  Editing by Henrietta Rose-Innes

  Proofreading by Joey Kok

  Set in Sabon 10.5/14pt

  Job no. 003474

  See a complete list of BlackBird Books titles at www.blackbirdbooks.africa

  For myself.

  For my niece, Lehlogonolo.

  For home.

  “Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.”

  – Nawal El Saadawi

  “Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

  – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Contents

  Madness

  Monkeys

  In Papa’s Name

  Baba’s Jwansburg

  Hair Tales

  Letty

  Skinned

  Growing Caterpillars

  Professor Banda

  Fourteen

  Becoming a God

  Blood of Filth

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  An Exciting New Look for BlackBird Books Fiction

  Madness

  HE LOOKS DIFFERENT IN THE COFFIN.

  I should’ve known the corpse would be exactly what it is: a corpse. I’d hoped that, after not seeing my brother Lucky for weeks, my final glimpse of him would be as a decent being – all washed and dressed for the occasion, not in the rags I’d last seen him in. But it’s not him, it’s something else, or someone else.

  I look at it, the body, lying inside the white box in the middle of the living room, surrounded by pretty white sheets and mourners lined up to see it. I tilt my head to get a better view; I still can’t find him. He is gone.

  Mama came into my bedroom when his body arrived home from the mortuary. “Come see your brother for the last time. He’s here,” she said. Like he wasn’t really dead. Like he was just lying in his coffin, sleeping.

  I think it’s better this way. I’m not ashamed to say that I’m relieved my brother is dead. His mind is at rest now. Lucky doesn’t have to deal with this ugly world anymore.

  I lean down and kiss the stranger’s forehead before walking away.

  The day the madness started – when Lucky began scratching his skin as if a demon had possessed his body, and mumbling things only a sangoma could decipher – he was taking me to school, just four years ago. And, like a baby howling hysterically after a fall and then giggling minutes later, I don’t recall much about that day. I only know that after that day, my brother wasn’t the same.

  Lucky wasn’t the only mentally unstable person I’ve known. There’s Ausi Thembi, who rubs her hair with a soiled handkerchief, asking anyone she comes across for ten cents. She often shows up at people’s homes and demands a plate of food: she’ll grab a chair in the kitchen and order whomever she finds to serve her. Then there was Dishembe, who was always drunk and pissing on himself. He died two years ago after drinking paraffin, confusing it with alcohol.

  I’ve heard that when Ausi Thembi was born, her mother hid her in their house, not wanting people to see what the gods had placed in her womb. Ausi Thembi didn’t look like other babies: she was too tall. When she started talking, her words all came out at the same time, and not even her mother could hear what she was saying. And when she began walking, she walked as if her legs were too heavy for her. She’d lift them up way too high, like she was wearing too-big boots.

  But my brother was like most boys in the township. He played football in the streets, had crushes on girls, made fun of his sister like most siblings do. Nothing said that in his mid-twenties he’d one day forget who he was, and then die in the bush all alone.

  Two women discovered Lucky’s body a week ago. Because Lucky often vanished for days but always returned home, when he went missing this time, we didn’t bother to go and look for him. Like his mental illness, nobody seems to know what caused his death.

  The women were harvesting mopane worms in the bush when they found him lying next to a mopane tree. They mentioned that they saw a line of worms on the tree. Because of this, they believe my brother was bitten by a snake, because a trail of mopane worms is said to be a bush snake disguising itself. But doctors couldn’t find anything that could have led to his final breath, not even poison.

  The women described how Lucky was covered with ants, and that big flies were hovering over his body. They also said that his skin was pale as a white man’s, and that he smelled like a dead, rotten pig. And he was. Dead.

  But what Mama is worried about is what I’ll be wearing at his funeral. She wants it covered up like some dirty secret: my big belly, growing each day in front of her.

  It’s just me, my brother’s wife, Maite, Mama and Aunt Lisbeth, sitting in the dining room.

  Maite says, “There’s another funeral three streets from here.”

  “I heard about it. Sad thing, really,” says Mama.

  “Four-year-old boy. He died in a fire.”

  “I heard his mother left a candle lit at night. Sad as it is, I know this township will be coming to Lucky’s funeral and not the little boy’s.”

  It is true. Thanks to his madness, Lucky was famous. Everyone in our township knew about the madman who roamed the streets showing people his penis.

  Earlier, after Lucky’s casket was unloaded from the hearse, there was the customary prayer, with some church choir singing and some priest preaching. Mama’s not a churchgoer and neither was my brother when he got sick. I don’t know how much Mama paid the church. But they were here, wearing their red-and-white uniforms and fanning themselves in the massive blue tent outside the house.

  Two choir ladies carrying colourful tambourines came and asked me to show them to the loo, since the mobile toilets were all occupied. I noticed how immaculately neat they were, from their faces to their manicured nails. Their hair was stylishly covered with red-and-white berets, slightly angled to the side. Their legs were in brown pantihose. I’ve heard that this particular church doesn’t allow women to reveal their hair; neither are they permitted to wear jewellery, as it’s said to attract “satanic spirits”. I’ve also heard that men who go to the church are encouraged to take as many wives as they please. They even have songs in their choir albums that exult polygamy. One song says that their church community is not bothered that people judge them for worshipping a man, their head minister, because Jesus too was a man. Our housemaid always plays their albums in the house while she cleans.

  Mama says to Aunt Lisbeth, “You will see them with their dirty claws when it’s time to eat. Just watch them tomorrow. The people in this township have never loved this family, but they always want a piece of my money.”

  Mama has hired three catering companies. This was after it became clear that the women here in Seshego would not bother to help, as they always do with other local funerals.

  After taking a sip of her Oros, placing the glass on the table and making sounds with her tongue like a kid savouring candy, Mama continues: “On Dikeledi’s thirteenth birthday, we didn’t invite many people, but they showed up in numbers, like some famous princess was getting married.”


  “Why didn’t they come to cook anyway?” asks Aunt Lisbeth.

  Mama makes that sound she makes with her teeth when she’s irritated: “Mxiiim. I heard a rumour yesterday that it’s because I don’t attend their families’ funerals. Lisbeth, I am a very busy businesswoman; I am always working, even on the weekends. When do I find the time to bury these people?”

  Aunt Lisbeth shakes her head. “You can never please anyone, especially Black people. Always wanting and not giving.”

  “You see these scones?” Mama says, pointing at the three buckets on the floor beside her. “I hired the best baker I know to make them. Delicious as they are, nê, no one from this township will taste them. I assure you. I will give them to my relatives who have travelled miles to bury their son. But these people that will be coming tomorrow just to fill plates and chew? Shame, not with my money. And if some are left, nê? I would rather feed the chickens.”

  Maite giggles.

  In our Pedi culture, in the days leading to a burial, widows are supposed to sit on the floor, covered up with heavy blankets from their head to their feet. They are supposed to cry and cry and cry for their deceased husbands, as if the world should stop spinning and just swallow them along with their misery. But Maite hasn’t let out one drop from her eyes. I know this is because she has already mourned for my brother, when she lost him to his distorted brain. I used to hear her scream and curse at night. She used to cry for her beloved husband, roaming the streets, getting teased and laughed at, wearing shabby clothes and smelling of garbage, showing girls his private parts whenever his brain told him to do so. So since we found out about Lucky’s death, Maite looks and feels the same as she did a week ago.

  She and Lucky met in high school. When I’d hear Clarence Carter playing in Lucky’s bedroom, I knew Maite, the thick girl with hips that bounced, was in there. Later, when he’d leave to accompany her home, I’d go into his bedroom. I always found an unfinished bottle of wine and an unfinished box of chocolates, which I’d stuff into my mouth. Lucky’s computer screen often had a paused American porn movie; I’d watch with interest and confusion. Like why, even when the man was not touching the woman, did she still moan like a cat? Was the moaning just an act?

  One day, Lucky walked up to Mama while she and I were watching television, and said to her, “I want to marry Maite.”

  “Wa’reng?”

  “My girlfriend Maite … I want to marry her.”

  He was only twenty years old. Mama muttered, “Are you mad?”

  But the following year, they got married anyway, in a traditional wedding.

  Unlike Mama, Maite often places her head on my tummy to hear the baby kick. Yesterday, her entire face grinning with curiosity, she asked me what it’s like, having someone grow inside me.

  I told her I hate it. That I hate myself and this baby, every second that it’s inside me. That three months ago, I wanted to drink a bottle of Jik and end it all.

  She looked at me like I was troubled child. “What stopped you from drinking it?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I want to punish myself a little longer.”

  Uncle Masheane, Mama’s brother, shows his head at the door and says, “We need more beer, some relatives have just arrived.”

  “You two, go get Masheane some bottles from the fridge,” Aunt Lisbeth says to me and Maite.

  We both quickly stand. But Mama grabs my wrist, says to me in this low, disgusted tone, “Sit down. What will people say?”

  I look at her, offended.

  She mutters, “I said sit down, Dikeledi.”

  I roughly remove her hand from my wrist and walk out, aiming for my bedroom. I overhear Aunt Lisbeth say, “You didn’t have to do that ngwanešo, she’s just a child.”

  “Who chose to get pregnant.” Bitterly, Mama adds, “After everything I’ve done for her? I am not the devil, Lisbeth. You don’t know Dikeledi very well. You wouldn’t imagine the things she’s put me through. You remember she was a quiet, sweet-sweet, beautiful child – an angel, remember? Diki did not bother anyone, Diki kept to herself, and Diki did as she was told. But when she turned fifteen, jiki-jiki, Diki was a changed person. She tiptoed and climbed out the windows and the walls like some thief in the night – running to some pub every weekend! Do you hear me, Lisbeth? Every single weekend, Dikeledi went to that pub to drink. She is a drunk!”

  “Mmalo!” cries Aunt Lisbeth.

  “I whipped her. God knows how many times I whipped that girl. But did she stop? As a mother raising a daughter by myself, I wonder, where did I go wrong? Did I spoil her too much? Was taking her to the best schools harmful to her? Now, she doesn’t even go to school because she’s ashamed of her big stomach. I have a right to be upset, Lisbeth. You know, sometimes I think she got herself pregnant just to hurt me. Her behaviour… you might wonder if the same enemies that bewitched my late son did the same to her.”

  It’s so official, to hear her call Lucky her “late son”.

  Then, Aunt Lisbeth finally asks the question everyone’s been pondering since they arrived here: “Who got her pregnant?”

  Mama sighs. “That’s the most hurtful part, ngwanešo – she doesn’t know.”

  As we’d anticipated, Lucky’s funeral is the biggest this township has seen in decades. Cars are lined up all over, covering three blocks.

  Just as Mama wanted, my belly is hidden. I’m wearing a big white dress that she bought me three days ago. “As if this family hasn’t been shamed enough. Everyone will be coming to the funeral. Everyone will know you are pregnant,” she said, flipping the dress at me. At that moment, I wished she could just lock me in my bedroom so I wouldn’t have to attend the funeral. But I have to bury my brother. Even though the last time we spoke, he didn’t know who I was.

  The madman’s sister is pregnant, did you see her? How long do you think she’s been pregnant? Who impregnated her? I’m not surprised she got pregnant at such a young age!

  The way people stare at me when I enter the tent for the ceremony, I know that’s how they’ll gossip. When they reach their homes tonight, after Lucky’s body has been lowered into the earth, they’ll talk about the food the caterers have prepared, the ridiculously hot weather, and then my belly.

  So why try hide the bump? Should I rather announce to everyone in attendance that one Saturday night, a man I’d never met before grabbed me on my way home, pushed and pressed my body against his car seat, and forced himself on me? That he was so strong, squeezing me down like a shoe crushing a cockroach, that when I tried screaming and kicking, my entire body felt paralysed? That somehow – for a moment while he humped on top of me – I jumped out of my own body and stared down at myself? That I saw myself lying there in his car, helpless?

  When I told my mother what had happened, she said I was lying. She said I was a rotten-spoilt-promiscuous drunkard. When I found out I was carrying, she said I was an irresponsible, stupid girl who doesn’t even know who got her pregnant. That I was bewitched. She also said I was sent into this world to make her suffer.

  Would people also want to know that every weekend when I was out, I’d find my brother sleeping on cardboard boxes on street corners – all alone, cold and starving? That when I bought him some food and sat with him as he shivered like a street kid hankering for drugs, he’d always ask, “What is your name?” As he stared blankly at me, I always replied, “I am Dikeledi – your little sister.”

  I always wished I could take him home. But we had learnt to let him be. When his sickness started, he disappeared. I looked all over the township for him. My mother searched and searched for him, thinking he probably got lost in a dump somewhere. But after eight long days, he walked straight through our gate, smelling like a bucket of spoiled porridge. Lucky knew where home was. He just didn’t want to be here. Soon after we bathed, dressed and fed him, he went right back to the streets.

  Mama concluded that someone in this township had bewitched him. That this particular wicked witch, who’d stolen his mind a
way, had died, and taken my brother’s brain to the grave.

  After the old, tired pastor has given his long, tedious sermon, Mama, who is wearing a black silky dress, and Uncle Masheane, in a black-and-white suit, take the stage. They describe Lucky as “the most intelligent boy” they ever knew.

  We all know about Lucky’s gifted brain. Everyone in this tent knows my brother was a genius. In his matriculation year, he got eight distinctions. That year, my brother’s face was plastered on newspapers and television. We were all so proud of him. My mother, ever the show-off, threw him a party. I’ll never forget the look on Lucky’s face. It was a face of a boy about to take over the world.

  But when he got to varsity, everything went south. I didn’t know about his depression until he came home in a body I didn’t recognise. He was so thin that when I touched him, I thought his flesh might flake away. But of course, genius that he was, he graduated cum laude.

  Lucky couldn’t find an accounting job after graduation, so he worked at a restaurant as a dish washer, then as a taxi driver, transporting locals. He finally got a proper job just a year before he got sick.

  Uncle Masheane almost breaks into tears when he says that, even though Lucky suffered a terrible, lifelong “headache” and died such a horrific, confusing death, he will remember his nephew as a “people person”. He’ll always remember Lucky’s bubbly personality, his silly jokes, his killer smile.

  I sit here in the front row with Maite. Tears coat my face and pained neck. Maite rubs my back and whispers softly, “He is in a better place now.”

  I look at Mama and Uncle Masheane, standing there delivering their grand eulogies, and I feel anger about to erupt from my throat. How dare they? How dare they make it seem like they weren’t ashamed of my brother’s madness?

  Ausi Thembi, the madwoman, arrives when we’re leaving for the cemetery, her jeans pulled up high over her stomach. We pass her on our way to the cars. Mama and Aunt Lisbeth go on ahead in Mama’s car, while Maite and I get into Uncle Masheane’s. Then I notice the man. He’s wearing a maroon suit and a black hat, and is leaning on a silver Peugeot 306. His face is obscured in a crowd of his friends; I shift on my seat to see him better.