Mvelo found the perfect person to help her in her mission to free Zola from the coffin. She turned to Cleanman Ndlovu,
a dreadlocked Zimbabwean who had made a home amongst them in the shacks. He had been a teacher in Zimbabwe. Unlike most refugees, he came to South Africa in the early nineties, trying to outrun his pain, only to find hostility in the cities; until he wandered to the shacks where it was possible to get lost amongst everyone fighting for survival. In these shacks, unlike some places, no one hassled others on the basis of their origins.

Besides, with a surname like Ndlovu, and Ndebele as his mother tongue, he did not stick out. In fact, he fitted in more easily than the Xhosas and Basothos who had moved to Durban for a better life. It was his name, Cleanman, which got him teased. He used to help Mvelo with her homework before she dropped out of school.

He held in him horrors of war and secrets that were unspoken. Mvelo told him about Zola’s request and the promise she had made to her mother. ‘But young one’, he said, ‘that is illegal. The municipal laws would not allow such a thing.’

‘Who cares, Cleanman?’ Mvelo was exasperated. ‘Who cares what the laws have to say? Look where we live, we have nothing. We are thousands here who share six toilets. Please,’ she cried, ‘you have to help me.’

He couldn’t stand tears. He walked away without giving her an answer, but she knew that he would help her. He would understand that it is unnatural for a body to be confined in a box.
Cleanman loved poems and he read one at Zola’s vigil by a man called Dylan Thomas. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day; / Rage, rage against the dying of the light—’

But she shut him up, maDlamini, the loud mouth of Mkhumbane. ‘Wena, Cleanman,’ she said, ‘uZola was not of old age, and she sure wasn’t a man. Sit down and stop this English nonsense—’

She was going on but her voice was drowned by the chorus. Women began to sing to disguise the argument. It was the custom of their social graces and discretions to cover any sort of public humiliation or shame. Cleanman looked sad and embarrassed, but he didn’t argue. He was not one for public displays or emotional outbursts. He simply closed his thick book, with the dog-eared pages, that had seen better days.

Zola’s vigil was beautiful. The whole of Friday night people came to the shack. Her body was brought back from the mortuary in a simple coffin bought by the neighbours from donations collected in the area. No one listened to Mvelo when she said Zola did not want a coffin. They looked at her with those oh-poor-fourteen-year-old-orphaned-and-pregnant, I-am-glad-I-am-not-you eyes.

Her voice came back at Zola’s send off. She sang away her fear about the life that was growing inside her belly, she sang away the dread about digging Zola out of the grave, she sang away the hard road ahead of her as a lonely orphan. She sang until she felt warm inside, like the colour orange. She opened her eyes and Cleanman was next to her. ‘Welcome back, young one, your soul is back in your eyes. It is good to see,’ he whispered to her. She, too, was released by sending Zola off. She felt free, and was sure that the people who stayed for the vigil had enjoyed themselves. They sang, and one by one they reminisced about Zola.

A woman from the big houses nearby came with a pot
of breyani. She looked nervous to be in the shacks, but was determined to speak. She stood up to say a few words about Zola, who used to do washing for her before she became too weak to work. ‘Zola is someone I will never forget because she blessed my house with a gift that I will treasure forever. My only child, Sunil, could not speak. The doctors thought he was autistic. He stared into space and sometimes he would bang his head on things and scream.’

‘When Zola came to work for us, he would follow her around. One day I found them sitting and communicating. They had developed their own language. She told me she thought he had speech locked up inside of him. He is now a happy boy who is doing well at school. When I heard about her death I wanted to come and pay my respects.’ Ms Naidoo had intended to drop off the breyani, say a few words and leave the shacks as soon as possible, but the atmosphere held her there through the vigil.

In her death, Zola had unified people, regardless of their social standing. Neighbours had improvised tins, bricks and beer cases as seats in front of her shack where they held the vigil.

A nurse from a clinic where Zola had been banned came to pay her respects as well. Mvelo noticed her in the crowd, and thought she was brave to show her face after how she had treated Zola. ‘It is because of me that she was banned from the clinic,’ the nurse admitted. ‘I am burning with shame when I think of it now.’

‘I myself am positive, and I had not come to terms with it because it was through my own stupidity, trusting a man that I should not have.’
‘When I found out I was positive, I became very angry and I took it out on my patients. Most did not respond to my rudeness. But Zola fought back when I said hurtful things to her. It was my fault, and I want to say, in front of her child here, that I am sorry. I should have been more understanding—’

The nurse was becoming emotional, so the women started singing again.

People Mvelo had never seen before stood up and said things about Zola. It was a beautiful night, the moon was red at first as the sun hid behind it, and later the night turned silver as the moon took over its shift from the sun. Most of the neighbours apologised for gossiping. ‘Bantu bomphakathi, you know me, I just like to talk. Now when I hear you using the Holy Book to rebuke those with loose tongues, I am repenting. I ask you to forgive me,’ said maDlamini.

One drunk shouted, ‘Ya, Mamgobhozi wendawo,’ and people chuckled, loudly punctuating her speech. The chuckles encouraged the drunk to get louder, ‘umaDlamini, uNdabazabantu, Home Affairs, Ugesi waseLamonti. There is nothing that she doesn’t know under the roofs of these shacks.’

Another song rang out to drown the unflattering comments made by the drunk. ‘Ai, I am just a bored old woman,’ maDlamini said. ‘I am sure Zola will forgive me, God rest her soul.’

Cleanman looked at Mvelo and nodded. The plan was on. They marked Zola’s grave and in the dark they would come back and dig out her coffin and free her into the soil as nature intended. Her coffin was simple and Cleanman watched closely how it closed and opened during the viewing of the body.
Zola had detailed her wishes for what she wanted when she died. She asked for Skwiza, her only surviving blood relative after Mvelo, to read what she had written. Skwiza stood up, her outfit hugging her tight around her curves softened by age, her eyebrows drawn in that clownish way some women like to do, lips bright red and a sweet perfume that could be smelt all the way to Durban, ignoring the sniggers from the mourners. She was perfect in her delivery, with gestures in the right places, pausing for emphasis where it was needed.

‘It is my wish,’ Zola wrote, ‘that people should know I died of AIDS. Not a long or a short illness, as they tell us kills most celebrities. Not pneumonia, not TB, not insanity, not witchcraft, but AIDS. This is my gift to all the gossipmongers of uMkhumbane. I give you permission to gossip loudly, not in whispers. Tell whoever cares to know that I lived positively with HIV, and I died of AIDS. Tell them that you heard it from the horse’s mouth.’

She asked Mvelo to read her favourite passage from the Bible, from Corinthians. ‘If I speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, I have become sounding brass. If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but don’t have love, I am nothing… Faith, hope, and love remain,’ Mvelo concluded. ‘The greatest of these is love.’

Mvelo looked at her mother’s face in the coffin. It was peaceful. She would never say another word to her again. Mvelo imagined that if her mother could say one last thing it would be, ‘Sing Mvelo, you were born to sing.’ So she did.

***

Tell us what you think: What do you think about the people who gossiped about Zola coming to her funeral?