PART 1 – MEETING BONOLO

Chapter 1: BONOLO

There was a girl with yellow and orange skin and slanted eyes who fell in love with me at a flat in Pretoria.

Right there she wanted to come home with me, but I was afraid I might be too drunk to drive us home.

She said she can call an Uber for us. She wanted to perform magic and make a car appear out of thin air. I told her not to. “My mother will think you’re a witch, and besides, Ubers don’t go that ‘Far East’. They steal cars in that part of the city, it might end up in Tembisa,” I said to her.

I drove drunk anyway. My car was the only way to get us home to Boksburg – an hour away from Pretoria.

When we got to my place, she danced for me while I played a slowed jam by DJ Kent on my laptop. She danced slowly, looked me dead in the eyes as if to seduce me. The chemistry turned physical and we made love throughout the night.

In the morning she told me her name was Bonolo, a Setswana name, although she wasn’t a Motswana; She was a nomad like her real mother. Her people had relocated here so long ago that there might not have been a time when they were not here at the very bottom of this ground – with all the blood on it.

She taught me four Nama words, the ones she remembered. She was given a Setswana name because a childless black couple had taken her in after her mother died in a township the Botswana government had built when it grew too tired of her people’s roaming-around, she said.

They put up stores and clinics and schools and told them to stay put and keep their clothes on.

Her mother wasn’t made to be still, so the township killed her, with its sorrow.

Since Bonolo had nothing else in the world to shade her but a dead mother, the government took the little girl child and gave her to South African friends who couldn’t have a child of their own.

She was eight years old when the South Africans came with her to Rustenburg. They gave her the name Bonolo, but her real name was something else.

Her old name was one of the few words she remembered. The couple that raised her was good to her; the woman she now called her mother was kind, and the man she called her father, the only father she ever did know, was a decent man too. She didn’t resent them, but still, she was angry.

The Blacks and the Whites must be in it together. They must have had an agreement to pretend as if they both don’t see. Too worried about each other, too familiar with the issues between them that they never see who else might be afraid for their lives: The nomads have no space to wander anymore.

Whites and Blacks push each other back and forth for this and that and no one in between is getting a turn. The Indians hide in their shops, selling for profit to buy their sanctuary; the Coloureds sit aside, orphaned from where they came from, waiting for someone to call their name. The Khoisan, an endangered kind, are fast dwindling.

The Blacks didn’t try convincing her that she wasn’t Khoisan anymore, but neither did they encourage it. Whenever she sang the songs her mother had taught her, they didn’t rebuke or discourage her, but they didn’t entertain it either. They only spoke Setswana or English to her and insisted on calling her Bonolo. Soon enough her birth name was also a thing of the past, buried along with her true identity.

She could speak Setswana even before the Blacks adopted her; the language was widely spoken in the country she came from – Botswana.

However, in South Africa, she had to learn other languages as well.

At the school she was sent to, some of the white kids spoke Afrikaans and IsiZulu.

She would often hear if someone from Gauteng had come up to the North West. A pair of girl twins from Kempton Park who were about her age would visit their father’s sister up her street in the summer. They spoke Setswana with their aunt and her husband and spoke IsiZulu to each other. Slowly, she picked up isiZulu from them and became so eloquent in the language that she could tell that the Isizulu spoken by men who came to work in the mines from Kwa Zulu Natal was not the same as the one spoken by men who came from Johannesburg. The ones from KZN sounded stronger, slower and moved deliberately. The other was spoken like water; it was quick and more open to taking from other languages (including Afrikaans) and replaced words with Isixhosa and English to get elsewhere quicker.

Since arriving in this new country, she’s had to explain her origins a lot. People would often mistake her for being Coloured, although she didn’t totally look like them.

Yes, they had the yellow skin and a similar cheekbone structure, eyes that sparkled like hers and looked like they could also be nomads, but they were not quite like her.

Chapter 2: THE DREAM

After we had been together for 4 months, I told her about my dream.

I told her about how they first came – when I was nine.

It was always the same dream.

In it, I am older and bigger and strong. I am standing on a landing ship, next to a man with death written on his face and I am armed and dressed in leopard skin. We are in the company of many kinds of men; big men, strong men, and black men. We descend upon the shore and spill blood; we show no mercy and have only one goal in mind – death.

The dreams were intense and incessant and gave me no rest for three years of my life.

I would wake up in the middle of almost every night screaming, and on some nights I even wetted my bed from the fear. I would then run to my mother. At first, she sent me to church to get prayers; when the prayers didn’t work, she sent me to a white woman in town with a Ph.D. who asked me if my mother beat me or if my father molested me before she would drug me. My mother let her drug me because the drugs ‘worked’. The house returned to being silent in the evening again, and by the time I was an adolescent I had overcome the fears. 

Bonolo said all those pills took my dreams away.

Bonolo took this Khoisan thing seriously, and this Khoisan thing made her difficult; even when we were with other people she would find ways to steer the conversation towards talks of genocide and revolution. Whenever someone disagreed with her she would get ugly and say that the Bantus didn’t belong here either, that their home was up in Nigeria, and that everyone should leave the land for her people to have. My friends disliked her, their women also disliked her; I never introduced her to my family except my older cousin Mzwakhe who only pinched his eyes and made a tired face at her when she lectured him about the difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Chapter 3: THE STRANGE GROUP OF 25 GUYS

Mzwakhe didn’t care what Bonolo had to say and no one else did, except a strange group of guys, about 25 of them altogether whom she’d met on campus. They were dirty and strange. I met them for the first time at a baby’s first birthday party in Ga-Rankuwa – Zone 2. They were skulking behind some grass outside a house smoking dagga and eating a pea and bean salad from a fancy ceramic serving dish that had been swiped from the kitchen. As I tried to introduce myself to one of them, a guy who I suppose looked like his mother because of his feminine face, interjected with that no introductions were needed, and that he’d seen me in a dream before, a dream he’d had while dying in Sebokeng.

The story about the Twenty-Five, as far as I know – from how she told it to me, is that in 2001 a man had re-appeared in Ga-Rankuwa out of nowhere. The man had been handsome in his youth, a philanderer and a playboy. The girls had adored him, but that was before Angola; he’d taken up with umMkhonto WeSizwe and vanished into war and returned with an ugly face. He’d disappeared almost 20 years before he turned up in Ga-Rankuwa again.

When he left in 1983, no one had heard from him since he was reported killed in action at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in ‘87.

Back in Ga-Rankuwa, he’d sometimes be spotted at a butchery buying mince or taking a shortcut through a field by a former schoolmate or an old girlfriend. They’d always try to show him that they were happy he was back, and would, without fail try to squeeze a laugh out of him. But it was hard to laugh or pretend all was well for the returned exile; he’d seen things in the border wars. His face was made ugly by scars from a time someone tried to burn him. His eyes had turned empty like a dead man’s would.

He skulked around Ga-Rankuwa for months walking the dusty streets up and down talking to young boys, challenging them to a game or two of soccer. On one occasion, he took down their names and one afternoon in the late summer he put up a poster for soccer try-outs; he was starting up a soccer team in the township. It was something for an old soldier to do, and no one begrudged him for his effort. At least it was something; at least he wasn’t thieving or raping. The mothers of the boys that he needed for his football club, some of whom had been his lovers when they were younger, gladly sent the sons they had had with other men to him. Twenty-five mothers obliged him and gave their boys, eleven for the first team, the other eleven for the second team and three reserves.

He called the team ‘The Skeletons’. He picked lanky boys with long arms and legs, who could outrun anyone and reach far. They took long strides on the soccer field, outpaced all the other boys. They played their positions well and kept discipline and most of all they knew each other. He trained them like a regiment and they behaved like one as well. Their passing was immaculate; everyone was where they needed to be when they played. They beat teams in Mamelodi, Atteridgeville and even in Tsakane. The boys dashed a lot of people’s dreams and consistently took home all the silverware for three years.

The team had been doing well, so the man with the burnt face organised a trip for them to Botswana. With the help of the township, he was able to raise the money needed and soon rented three Volkswagen buses which would take them and a couple of the boys’ mothers to a mediocre game lodge near Serowe in Botswana.

When they arrived in Serowe, he disappeared with the boys into the desert. Around Ga-Rankuwa the story had been that the coach had molested the boys; others said they had been cursed by a wizard-baboon in the Kalahari. What is certain is that all Twenty-five of those boys came back from Botswana different from who they were when they left. Their coach, however, did not return with them; he hadn’t been seen since 2003. The boys didn’t say anything to the Game Rangers who pulled them out of the wastelands of the Makgakgadi thirsty and dry. When they got back, they said nothing to anyone about why they never arrived at the guesthouse, or why their coach had stolen off with them in VW kombis in Gaborone, leaving the other 3 chaperones stranded in a city so far from Mamelodi or Soshanguve or Atteridgeville.

They were also mum on what happened in the five months between their disappearance and them turning up at the edges of a dried up lake. They had just returned to South Africa and in the 15 years since, they have barely been seen apart.

Tshiamo, one of them, the one who said he’d seen me in a dream, was moved by his family to the Vaal when he was 16. He became terminally ill without any explanation. He was on the brink of death, when the remaining group of boys all arrived by taxi at his aunt’s doorstep in Sebokeng and held a vigil over his breaking body. The next morning, he was as if nothing had ever troubled him. None of the boys were ever apart for more than a few days after that. I never really learned their names though, not all of them anyway; I knew there was a Tshiamo, Xolani and a Kabelo.

One-night while I was out drinking with Bonolo and the boys, I asked them why they called each other ‘Dead Men,’ and Tshiamo said to me that it was because they were already dead and that their duty was to die. I didn’t like to take them too seriously; I was at times afraid that Bonolo was cheating on me with one or more of them. They all agreed with each other, all 26 of them including her, and they believed the grass they smoked blessed them. They all believed a reckoning was coming soon and that they all had a part to play in it. Tshiamo said this about me too; he said he knew I was touched by the same thing that had touched them.

As time went on, as I started to fall further in love with Bonolo, also I began to understand her less. She frustrated me, she really believed in this Africa thing. She believed in sacred and magic things; she believed her hair was special, and that her people were special. I just wanted her to stop smoking weed so she could finish her diploma and we could get married. I was working well in sales. I had a car and my own place and if she got a job we could get a bigger place together.

Fourteen months into our relationship, she was one set of exams away from finishing school, but she’d drifted further into her obsession with the reckoning she imagined. She never studied; she’d even moved off campus and into my flat in the east. She spent the whole day on the internet or smoking grass with a teenage girl who lived with her parents in the complex I rented in.

We started to fight a lot or rather I fought with her, but she never heard me; and the whole time I thought she was losing it, I was losing myself too, I fell even deeper in love with her. She became more beautiful to me every day.

To be continued…

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