The Sunday News
My father and I enjoyed, or should I say endured, an interesting father and son relationship. It was interesting in the Chinese sense of troublesome and worrying. When the Chinese wish you interesting times they are cursing you. I know I was my father’s most favourite son because he would mistakenly call all other people by my name. And I leant how to write his name first before I did mine.
He died his first death when he realised that I could scribble his signature photographically. To my father I was a permanent suspect. He always landed on me that look which without words declares: I am watching you! He appeared always to read my mind and see through my soul.
In turn I carried the suspicion that all the many terrible things I was as a kid were a true representation of what my father was as a kid. I was a true fourth son of my father and a disaster. It was his fatherly job, a difficult one, to watch me closely. One foible that my father noticed early enough in my character, not my personality because I totally hid that from him and everybody, was extremism. As a kid I was an extremist. Everything I did was in excess and always out of proportion.
I took all things too far. Being an Anglican priest and a school headmaster made my father excellent for the job of monitoring an unruly and disorderly son.
A hunter and a gatherer
My curious habit as a little kid was hunting. I used snares and other clever traps to catch wild fowls, Guinea fowls, rabbits and bucks. To start with my father was alright with me bringing wild meat home. He got worried when my primary schooling began to suffer because I spent almost all my time erecting snares and traps and or just thinking about catching wild animals for their meat that I loved far more than the beef and goat meat that was plentiful in his homestead.
For every good hunt my father would congratulate me for being clever and adventurous. So I made sure that whenever I had a good catch my father would know about it, I shopped for his compliments habitually. After every compliment he would suggest gently that I should apply the same creativity of mind in my school work as I was in my hunting and gathering of wild meats and wild fruits.
That I was investing my wits in hunting more than my schooling is a point he took every opportunity to make, initially gentle and later much aggressively and tersely. He worried that I would throw my otherwise promising future to the pursuit of rabbits and other small things in life.
I knew and felt better about what I was up to. I got a tantalising thrill from stopping fowls and bucks in their tracks and consigning them to my pot. He thought I was majoring on minor issues and minoring on major issues, ah JW!
So one day when JW landed from one of his many business visits to town, Bulawayo, I went to receive him at the bus station.
How schooling had been was his first question to me after the greetings and other ritualised pleasantries. My own big disclosure was about the many bush fowls that I had managed to ensnare using a clever trick that I believed was my own personal invention. I had sprinkled maize seeds in a chosen spot in the field. From that spot I dropped further seeds one by one after another in different directions.
Each line of seeds led to a trap. The trick worked wonders. The bush fowls that moved in groups arrived at the spot and pecked away at the seeds and eventually found each one of themselves picking seeds towards the far ends of the field where more than half of their group got ensnared. I caught 12 birds in total. I excitedly narrated my exploit to my father and eagerly expected his hearty congratulations. I was saddened at the sudden way he changed topic and shepherded our conversation another direction to other issues.
When we got home my father went to the room to personally inspect the multiple smoked and dried carcasses of bush fowls. I stood at a good distance to watch him encounter living evidence of my championship as a hunter. He shook his head several times in disapproval with his mouth wide agape. One would be forgiven for thinking that he was looking at living evidence of witchcraft.
I withdrew to the bushes to inspect my snares and set up new ones. I dismissed my father as impossible to please. I comforted myself with the belief that he wished he was me as a kid. I was certain he could never at any point have captured so many birds in one day. I was the real deal! I got back home and was surprised my father said nothing to me in complaint or in compliment.
The following day, a Monday, at school my class teacher told me to leave whatever I was doing and report to the Headmaster’s office, to my father. He wasted no words, “after school today go to the fields and remove all the snares and traps that you have out there, all of them.”
I wanted to plead my case but he cut me, “if you finish all the birds what will be left to be hunted by you and others, allow them to breed another season and multiply, please, you can now leave.” I first and last heard the term “environmental terrorism” from my father that day. I complied. From then on I kept my hunting exploits safely away from JW. He was a kind of animal rights activist that could never see good in a great hunter like me, I concluded.
I was sentenced to school
To get me out of the bushes of Siganda and away from vulnerable animals and the village girls that I had begun to look at with predatory interest my father posted me to boarding school. I had miraculously passed my Grade Seven exams. Cyrene Mission was a grand mixture of a prison, mental asylum and a university.
We were confined, we became mad and we learnt a lot. JW was deeply wounded when he came for the first and the second Prize Giving Day at Cyrene, in my form one and form two end of years. I collected not even a single prize which embarrassed my father before other Anglican priests and parents.
He pleasantly but firmly made it known to me that he had no eyes to look at other priests or mouth to talk to them because of his son that was not mentioned amongst excellent students. Starting from my form three I took a personal decision to be intelligent and also work hard. Except for Mathematics, I conquered and mastered all the other subjects, working with my friend Alfred Dliwayo, a disaster of a human being who was more comfortable when he told a lie that he was trying to tell the truth. Alf was a poetic liar! He once convinced me that Shabba Ranks and MC Hammer were actually his cousins.
The tables were turned when JW came for my form three Prize Giving ceremony. Except for Accounting and Mathematics, those subjects from Lucifer himself, I collected all the prizes and became the wonder boy of the mission school. Again Joseph was not the least impressed. He wore his customary cold and dry face at the sight of me standing on stage as a list of subjects were named under my belt as the crowd whistled and ululated thunderously.
When we parted ways at the end of the day he whispered some words to me: “try to work with others, like a study group of sorts, success cannot be yours alone, monopoly is an inch away from greed and evil.” My father was against extremism, positive or negative. Like Aristotle’s philosophical concept of the “golden mean” JW would have “nothing in excess.”
He told me “don’t fly up close to the sun you will melt, or down close to the sea, you will drown, fly mid-way.” Up to now total success or total failure equally scare me. My father was that kind of “golden mean” man. When he bought a new suit of which he did many times, he would wear the new jacket with an old and tired trouser to moderate the shine. As he rests in peace I entertain the belief that he is not totally dead as much as he is not fully living, to avoid any extreme case of life or death.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from KwaMabusabesala Village, Siyabuswa, in Mpumalanga. Contacts: [email protected]
