Mvelo’s downward spiral began with the news of a death
in 2002. Nonceba’s grandmother had died of old age in the States. It was the first time that Mvelo had seen Nonceba so distraught. She was beside herself with grief and Sipho looked on helplessly because he could do nothing to make her feel better. She had to go and bury her grandmother.

It was clear that it wasn’t going to be a short trip. She needed to attend to all her grandmother’s affairs and spend time grieving. She left promising to send Mvelo additional Maths lessons and care packages with all sorts of American goodies through the post. Zola never communicated with Nonceba, out of pride, but she did not interfere with
her daughter’s friendship with Nonceba. Nonceba sent
the packages to Mvelo’s school address and continued to communicate with her teachers to ensure that her education did not suffer.

Sipho tried to sell his house. He was lost without Nonceba. He feared that she would not come back, so he started making plans to go to her in America. No one wanted to buy his house in Mkhumbane because Nonceba was rumoured to be a witch. That didn’t stop Sipho from going to her. He left the house with Mzokhona, his brother, who was very different from Sipho. He was like river debris that moves in whichever direction the river flows, drunk from noon till night. Sipho packed his bags and flew away to join Nonceba.

Nonceba’s grandmother Mae had left America for Africa looking for something she already had. She could trace her roots back to West African slaves and Native American buffalo hunting tribes. And then there were the despicable horrors of the violations of slaves by their masters. It led to her looking less African and more exotic, as though she was from lands unknown. Growing up in the virtually whites-only potato state of Idaho, she did not fit in, so she set out to find a home.

This led her first to the reservations. But watching the devastation of people who were once so close to nature, cramped into a small space in a vast land that they once roamed freely, depressed her. The alcohol and gambling infuriated her. It drained her of hope. So Africa became her destination to search for a place to belong. Her goal was to find the blackest man she could find, who would make her children black, so they would not have the identity crisis that she’d had.

Black girls wouldn’t usually give the darkest men the time of day, but Mae was drawn to them like a moth to a light. She found one who was from the proud Tshawe, Phalo, Hintsa, Gambushe, Majola and Thembu, the Xhosa chiefs. She didn’t have to go far. She met him on the plane even before touching down in Africa.

He was coming home after studying in the States for some years, helped by scholarships from the missionaries. They were drawn to each other like old souls hit by a sense of déjà vu. Her plan to embark on a pilgrimage from the foot of Mother Africa in Cape Town to her head in Egypt, were folded
right there and shelved. Gugulethu Hlathi couldn’t thank his ancestors enough for bringing him this unexpected beauty.

When the two met they were the answer to each other’s dreams. And then their daughter Zimkitha, ‘beautiful’, Nonceba’s mother, was born. They settled in a small tranquil village near the Wild Coast. Zimkitha was the answer to Mae’s prayers. Black enough to be viewed as African, with stubborn Native American high cheekbones and hazel eyes, she fitted comfortably into the black community. She did not have to endure the cruelty that her mother had experienced. Darker people admired her light skin and treated her well. Children wanted to be her friend, and teachers treated her with extra special care.

It was in her late teens that trouble came knocking. Like a young mule, she couldn’t be tamed, and the volatile political uprisings at the time did not help.

Her parents had taught her that she could be anything she wanted to be; she knew no boundaries of rules imposed on blacks. The beautiful Wild Coast was not big enough for her, it choked her free spirit. Events leading to the Soweto uprising saw her cut the apron strings from her protective mother and dictatorial father. She moved to Johannesburg, settling into a cosmopolitan, interracial Hillbrow where she and a bunch of frustrated liberal white youth appointed themselves as civil disobeyers.

Influenced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, they went around peacefully transgressing. When accosted and forcefully removed from benches marked for whites only, they would sing and dance. Zimkitha loved it, but underneath all this there was serious work going on. They were merely distracting the police from catching on to the young freedom fighters who were mobilising locally and internationally to set South Africa free.

Part of the reason that Zimkitha started sleeping with Johan Steyn was merely because she had been told not to. Then she found herself in jail, pregnant with Nonceba, Johan’s daughter. She was arrested under the Immorality Act after being caught with a well-known Afrikaans dominee’s son.

She had seen the police coming and she dared Johan to kiss her in front of them. He was terrified at what she was asking him to do. Just when he was about to turn and run, she grabbed hold of him and kissed him deeply. The truth was, she never really loved Johan, her relationship with him was just part of her rebellion.

Johan was timid and Zimkitha was frustrated by this. She suspected that deep down he was still under the spell of apartheid indoctrination. Her relationship with him was the beginning of her downfall. Prison hardened her heart and turned her carefree spirit fearful. Having a child killed her adventurous impulses.

Kissing Johan in public had pressed the buttons she intended to press. The police immediately threw her in jail, and roughed him up, calling him a disgrace for consorting with a kaffertjie. But Johan didn’t have the courage to stand
up for her. He could feel her eyes burning through his back as he walked away, deeply conflicted and embarrassed. She had thought the act would dislodge a freedom fighter latent in him, but she had miscalculated. She had thought he would not let her be arrested with his baby in her belly. When she saw him hang his head in shame, she knew the sting of betrayal. It was no longer a game to disobey the law.

Every step that he took away from her further disconnected him from Zimkitha, and he knew that he had now done something profoundly immoral.

He wrote letters to her compulsively, but he never sent them. In the letters he apologised to her over and over for his weakness and inability to face up to what he knew was wrong. ‘What you will never understand is how hard it is to see disappointment in my father’s eyes. He is a proud man of God who believes that it is God’s will that blacks and whites should never be together. I could never tell him about making you pregnant. I can’t bear to lose his love and trust in me. I am the first born of five sons. It would kill me to have my brothers look at me with scorn. I was a good son before leaving Bloemfontein to come to Johannesburg. I believed my father’s theories until you sat across from me that day. Your carefree laugh and devil may care attitude scared me, but I was drawn to you at the same time. You came into a bar where only the bartenders and not the patrons were black. Yet there you were, a beautiful and tempting black woman. I didn’t think you noticed anyone there, let alone me. We were just white faces drinking our beers, and you were with your liberal white pals, stirring up trouble by entering a bar that you knew you knew you were not allowed in. Our shameful secret fantasies were exposed as we blatantly and lustfully stared. Then you and your friends stood up to dance, your hips gyrating as if you were in your own living room. One girl in the group put her arm around your waist as you danced close to each other, your bodies touching. My head began to spin as I watched you in silence. It was the wife of the bar owner who snapped us out of it. She slapped the lust out of her husband, who
was practically drooling, and they manhandled you and your friends out of there.They may have removed you from the bar, but not from me. I followed the group until I got a chance to worm my way into your life by making friends with some of your friends, and pretending to be fighting for the same cause. I didn’t fool you, though. It took time for you to drop your guard with me. You had breezed into my life and turned me inside out.’

Johan wrote these letters to Zimkitha to save himself from going mad. He kept them, in the vain hope that one day he would reunite with her. He fantasised about how she would read them and forgive him. Before Zimkitha, the only person who had threatened to break his well-moulded idea of black people was Sihle, the sole black student who studied medicine with him. Missionaries had pleaded to get him into a university that did not allow blacks in their classrooms, and the lecturers grudgingly taught him, but secretly wished he wasn’t as smart as he was because he was proving them wrong about young black minds. Sihle was sensitive to this, but his determination to complete his studies was stronger than any discrimination he had to deal with.

Johan now guiltily remembered how he was one of those who had made Sihle’s life hell.

If he ever got that second chance with Zimkitha, would he be brave enough to face up to his father and his family? His thoughts consumed him and he changed into a ghost of his former self. He began operating on autopilot, finishing his medical studies at Wits University, but his mind was barely there. He became addicted to sleeping pills, popping them night after night, as Zimkitha’s burning eyes came for him.

When his family suggested Petra, the daughter of another dominee, for a wife, he did not object. He was tired of fighting. He replaced sleeping pills with stronger, numbing drugs. He was a doctor, he kept telling himself, he was not a common addict.

Petra knew she was competing with something powerful for her husband’s affection. She sank into her own depression, in a loveless, childless marriage. She took comfort in the fact that she was married to a doctor, with a family that appeared to love God. She dared not scratch the surface. Things lurking under the peaceful facade were too frightening.

Zimkitha broke when they threw her into a dark, silent cell and left her there for months. The only sound was the dripping tap, day in and day out. She had grown desperate
and had made a plan, which she waited to execute. On the morning that she went into labour, she grabbed hold of the hand that popped in to drop her one meal of the day. She sank her teeth in and locked her jaw like a pit bull. The screams of agony from the warden brought others running. They opened the cell and were confronted by the stinging smell of Zimkitha’s stale urine, and the horror of blood in her mouth. She looked like a crazed animal, her overgrown, unkempt bushy hair covering most of her face.

Right there her water broke. They were shocked into action. While some tendered to the bitten woman warder, others busied themselves assisting her to give birth to Nonceba. A new life has a way of making hardened hearts forget about everything else. Zimkitha decided to name her golden baby, Nonceba, ‘mother of sympathy’.

The baby became her ticket to freedom, but the experience left her too damaged to carry on. She left Johannesburg and went back to be with her mother in the Eastern Cape. Her father had gone out of his mind with worry when he heard about her arrest and had joined the struggle and led strikes. He had been shot and killed for fighting for her release. Then Mae’s talk of returning to America began, but Zimkitha simply refused. Her mother had told her the stories about how she had suffered there, and she didn’t want to be in another country that was spiteful to her.

She wasn’t coping with the baby and with the continued killings of freedom fighters. She became listless. Her spark was gone and the fight had drained out of her. On Nonceba’s first birthday, as they were blowing out the candles on the little girl’s cake and clapping to her joyful, childish squeals, the radio announced a train massacre. The announcer talked of black on black violence, but Zimkitha knew it was so much more than that. Hers and Mae’s faces fell in dismay. They looked at each other and Nonceba, young as she was, sensed the change of mood and began to cry. Her grandmother picked her up and walked about trying to calm her.

Zimkitha began to tremble. The frustration of it was choking her. She couldn’t breathe. Mae held her close and rocked her until she stopped shaking. ‘I don’t know why I thought we could win this. I don’t know why we even fought this,’ she told her mother through her tears. Young Nonceba was looking at both of them with big sad eyes. Mae switched off the radio and they listened to the sound of the ocean humming nearby.

Zimkitha waited for her mother to take Nonceba with her to the craft circle where Mae worked with community women making baskets.

Then she calmly walked into the waves.