Holiday Read #2: Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda

My second holiday read was Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying. I enjoyed my first holiday read, Bitches' Brew, but this one was just a cut above. Shame for Fred Khumalo, he was great until he faced such competition!

I've actually avoided Zakes Mda books before, because they just sounded so macabre. A proessional mourner? Weird and macabre. So I thought before I read it.

I took it out of the library because I thought I should just give him a try to enlarge my South African literary education. But wow, this book blew me away.

It was a bit macabre actually. Lots of death. And a story that would be altogether too harrowing if i wasn't also altogether too beautiful.

Five stars, I totally recommend it.

Holiday Read #1: Bitches' Brew, Fred Khumalo

The first book on my pile of Holiday reads was Bitches' Brew, by Fred Khumalo.

It is written as a series of letters between Lettie and Zakes. The story begins with Lettie, from Lesotho, leaving her rural home for Durban after realising she is pregnant. On the bus to Durban she meets Zakes, the Jazz musician. Zakes grew up in a devout family. But when he discovered Myles Davis and Steve Biko at university, he dropped out of university, dropped out of his family, and made his own way in the world.

After their meeting in the bus, they part ways. But eventually end up coming in and out of one another's lives. The letters between them reminisce about the parts of their lives spent together, and fill each other in on the times spent apart. The other men and women in their lives, the shebeens they ran, the enterprises they were involved in and Zakes' eventual descent into hardened criminal.

It is a beautiful book. About love and about stumbling your way through life.

It is a bit explicit sometimes (so many local books are! I know I am prudish but I wish this wasn't such a characteristic of local literature.) But I recommend it. It is well worth reading. For the poignant love story and for the array of characters he paints so well. And for an intense picture of the era the book was set in: the 60s, 70s.

Ask people questions

One of the life lessons I learned from reading about Robert Sobukwe:
Ask people questions.

Particularly, people from other African countries. But actually, this applies to everyone really. The people you meet have this great wealth of experience you can learn from.

Know a doctor? Ask them about the strike... what conditions are like in hospitals... what their day to day experience of work in life... how things are different in different areas in SA...
Know a teacher? Ask them about their salaries... ask them about the Department of Education... ask them about the state of schools... ask them about the capabilities of learners... ask them about OBE...
Know a Kenyan? Ask them about their elections... their government... ask them how their nation is managing to get education right...
Know an Afrikaans person? Ask then about how they feel about their place in the new SA... ask them how they feel about Wikus... ask them what their take on home language eduation is...

We all have such different experiences of life, especially in South Africa. You can stand in the queue at the ATM with people whose life experience is SO different from yours, speaking to them could open your eyes. Give you insight into things you really have no other way of understanding. Speak to them. Ask then questions.

I got this from Robert Sobukwe's biography How Can Man Die Better. He spoke about how, in his day, information about what was going on in other places was really inaccessible. Particularly in other African countries. Because of the censorship and propaganda of the South African government I suppose. So what they used to do was just talk to people, make the most of opportunities to ask people questions. When you met someone from Ghana, say - drill them will questions about what is going on there.

And I think the principle easlity extends to day to day life - we can learn so much about the world from the people around us. Speak to them, ask them questions!





(I also learned this lesson from one of my pastors - he always used to tell us to take the opportunities presented to us to ask people questions!)

Lesotho

This last weekend I went on a holiday to Lesotho with some friends. What an adventure!!! The highlight was a completely death defying pony trail in a place called Malealea in the mountains. Beautiful, remote. But the paths were TINY and we were high high up. Sometimes I just had to cling to my pony and not look down!

Lesotho was beautifu. The thing that struck me most about it was how they have this urban-rural thing going. Maseru is *enormous.* But it seemed to me that most of Maseru was what we would call the rurals. Or at least, certainly more rural than city. Lots of big big plots. People herding cattle, vegetable gardens and fruit trees everywhere. Guys wearing the archetypal blanket-over-one shoulder :)


I'm reading an autobiography of a Chinese lady at the moment. Something that struck me in the book was when she was writing about how China was going through a huge famine, some time after the Great Leap Forward. Her family lived on quite a large plot of land so when food became scarce they started growing a lot of their own food. And her family taught some of their neighbors to do the same. So they rode out the national famine and they were fine. But the people living in city centre apartments, high density accommodation, they were literally starving. Because food was not available in the shops, and when it was they did not have enough money to buy it.

It seems to me that that is the best method to protect people from ecomomic crises: ensure that people have enough land that they can grow their own food. Or at least grow some of their own food.

So seeing the setup in Lesotho, I was reminded of that. Then I thought of our RDP housing - some of them are so close to each other you could barely hang washing between them. And it seems to me that Lesotho is getting something right that we are getting wrong.

There is such a stark contrast as you cross the border back into South Africa. In and around Maseru the landscape is just dotted with houses and small fields of crops, little shops, cattle. On the South African side of the border, it is just fences. Commercial farms. No people to be seen. Again, it seems to me that Lesotho is getting something right that we are getting wrong.