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| ISBN-13: | 9780822374985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Sales rank: | 796,750 |
| File size: | 763 KB |
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Incognegro
A Memoir of Exile & Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson III
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2008 Frank B. Wilderson, IIIAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7498-5
CHAPTER 1
JOHANNESBURG: JUNE 1995, EARLY WINTER
"Mr. Wilderson?" It is impossible to place the accent amid the newsroom clatter behind his voice. Not Afrikaans, but not completely English. At least not the pristine English one hears in the suburbs of Sandton, Parktown, or Rosebank. Those dulcet shopping mall voices made all the more tranquil by the resonance of Muzak, the purr of Mercedes, and the stabilizing presence of the army in the townships just over the hill. Still, I am put off by his voice and by the questioning tone with which he has answered the telephone. I am, after all, returning his call. A pause. "Mr. Frank Wilderson?"
"Yes," I say, anxiously, but not irritably. "I'm returning your call."
"Of course, thank you so much." He pauses again. "My name is Stefaans Brümmer. But then you know that. I'm an investigative reporter for the Mail & Guardian. You probably know that too."
I try to calm my breathing. "I've seen your by-line."
I am suddenly aware of Khanya sitting in the next room, no more than twenty feet away. She is watching me — or trying not to watch me — from the parlor that combines with the dining room. We have been married exactly five years. For all I know today could be our anniversary. Maybe this is why she called this morning, suggesting we end our separation. Perhaps she thinks that I, for once, remembered the date and that is why I suggested we dine at the Carlton Hotel. But if we were married five years ago today, why didn't she say something at dinner? She's testing me. That's the only explanation. I have a sinking feeling that if it is our anniversary and if she does believe I remembered, then this call from this man will not only cause me to fail the test but it will confirm the truth of her most biting criticism. "You love anarchy," she had said when we separated, "more than you'll ever love me."
The scent of heat on damp wool wafts from the parlor as her fleece, draped on the chair beside her, dries in front of the gas fire. I hear the Orrs' polite conversation trying to draw her attention away from me. Their failure is clear, a fertile void where Khanya's voice should be. I do not look at her.
We are still wet from having queued in the rain for a kombi on Bree Street. Earlier this evening, or perhaps the day before as it has rained all week, lightning hobbled one of the pillars of our would-be taxi shelter; a shelter that would have otherwise kept the heads, though perhaps not the shoulders, of six or seven adults dry. We will all have to stoop beneath its sagging roof if we want to stay dry, I thought, as Khanya and I dashed through the taxi rank. Instead, through the silent consent of African ubuntu, the adults relinquished the crippled shelter to several children who shared it with an old woman.
From lampposts some of us tore down cardboard posters that read The '94 Elections Brought Democracy to the Nation, The '95 Elections Will Bring Democracy to Your Community. Others tore down posters of Nelson Mandela with his eyes commanding us to VOTE ANC! We held them above our heads for respite from the lashing rain. But the soggy cardboard umbrellas upon which Mandela's face was painted soon surrendered and water ran mercilessly down our arms and legs.
I had tried to keep my spirits high by marveling at the play of lamp light on Khanya's high cheekbones and dimples, at how happy she was that we were reunited, and wondering, shamefully, how anyone could be happy to be reunited with me. It wasn't long before my thoughts wandered to our dissolving metaphor of protection — the new state president-cum-umbrella — and I found myself rehashing questions that seemed to be erupting across the country whenever and wherever Black people gathered to contemplate the future: Will the ANC improve the economic position of the poor or simply enlarge the middle class? Does Mandela's consolidation of power in the wake of Chris Hani's death portend personal rule from the top? Will we become a one-party state, like the US where the one party is capital?
But as alarming as these questions are, I know (as I hold my breath and wait for Stefaans Brümmer to link me to what only Stimela Mosando and his people should know about) that such questions are not the elemental source of the pit in my stomach. Which is not to say they are false or a ruse of concerns hiding a true anxiety. They are neither false nor a ruse. I do dread the New World Order. The "New" South Africa. The flag-and-anthem cardboard cutout of a country that we are fast becoming. But what I fear even more is the recurrence of an image I thought I had left in that country which, for lack of a more ambiguous word, I once called "home": my black face in the mirror.
* * *
My voice drops when I say "by-line," in an effort — I can only surmise — to draw less attention to myself. It has, of course, the opposite effect. Mr. and Mrs. Orr and Khanya lock in on me like radar. The more they try to go on with their conversation and pay me no mind, the more attention they pay.
"Is this a good time to talk?" Brümmer asks. Before I can answer he says, "Look I'm working under a deadline. The paper goes to bed tonight and I'd really like your side of the story."
"How did you get this number?"
"I did some research and found that you had had an ANC attorney for the Vista —" He stops short of calling my dismissal from Vista University in Soweto an "affair." He wants to be tactful. He wants to get a story. "Someone at Shell House..." Shell House was a tall office building in downtown Jo'burg that the oil company with the same moniker had given to the ANC in the hopes, we were all assured, of getting nothing in return. "Someone at Shell House told me Christopher Orr was your attorney. I called him and found that he was your landlord too. Look, I'm sorry about your dismissal. The new South Africa seems slow in coming."
"Yes," I agree, "slow in coming," acutely aware that he and I might agree only on the pace and not the destination, for he is certainly no communist. I have been standing the whole time. Now, I sit down on the small awkward chair the Orrs keep beside the wrist-and-elbow sized table upon which the telephone rests. "Is this about the university?" I ask, my eyes darting over to the parlor. Khanya and the Orrs have brought their conversation to a halt. They are looking at me looking at them.
"I'm afraid not." His voice betrays a tone that I have come to fear and dislike during the last five years of my life in Johannesburg. It is a tone of apology laced with accusation. A tone that White English-speaking South Africans are noted for. Unlike the Boers, they do not possess the iron-willed conviction that god has ordained them to rule South Africa, but nor are they willing to subordinate themselves to the ethical, much less political, authority of Black people. The Boer bloodhound has been good to them. His bark and bite have protected them from the uneven and unmanageable proliferation of Black rage, for they were disinclined to bark and bite themselves. No, the intonation of English voices is more difficult to assess. One must listen more carefully (What does this White man want of me? or What does he plan to do to me?), for their voices walk a line between subdued irritation and hazy patronization — and don't telegraph their intent.
I brace myself.
"One moment," he says, and slowly the din and bustle of the newsroom falls into emptiness behind his closing door.
I rack my brain across five years of political activity, some aboveground, some underground, some legal, some not, most in a hazy zone that will always elude clarity. What could be more damning than the storm around my dismissal at Vista and my solidarity with the South African Student Congress when we took the campus by force and held it for nearly a year?
The kombis for Black people don't take you door to door like the metered taxicabs that were, until two years ago, reserved for White people. But nor are they nearly as expensive. So, Khanya and I had been dropped off several blocks from the Orrs' house. Mr. and Mrs. Orr, an English-speaking couple with affinities to the Freedom Charter but whose politics beyond that I did not know and did not ask, had spotted us as we hurried down their driveway to the carriage house in back which I now rented from them. Mrs. Orr dashed out of the house holding the Mail & Guardian over her head as an umbrella. In her hand she held a message. She said Khanya could dry off by the gas fire in the parlor while I used the telephone in the next room. On the back of an old shopping list she had written all that she'd been told: Stefaans Brümmer, Mail & Guardian, then the number, and Please call, urgent. The word urgent had been scratched out and the word important written there instead. No doubt, Brümmer did not want Mrs. Orr to alarm me and risk my not returning his call; or worse, prompt me to skip the country.
"No," Stefaans Brümmer repeats when he has closed the door and secured his privacy, "it's not the student/worker occupation of Vista University. Well, in a way it is and in a way it isn't."
"Then what," I hiss. I don't know what embarrasses me more about my sudden outburst, the fact that it was made to an otherwise sympathetic reporter who is only doing his job (and unlike our treatment in the mainstream press, his reporting on the Vista takeover did in fact cast us more as communards than as a blight upon civic stability), or the fact that Khanya and the Orrs overheard it and took note.
"It's about what the National Intelligence Agency is calling..." Another pause. "Your 'subversive activities.'" This is it, I think. But I don't say a word. The first one to speak, someone wise and now forgotten once told me, loses. But what has Stefaans Brümmer got to lose? Somebody tell me that. "Joe Nhlanhla," he continues, "the new NIA chief, thinks you're a threat to national security." He waits for a response. I am looking at my wife. She is looking at me. What can I say to make her turn away? Then he drops the other shoe. "So does Nelson Mandela." And he lets this sink in before adding, gratuitously, "The new state president." I can hear myself breathing. I am sure I can be heard breathing for a hundred miles. "Would you care to comment?" I almost laugh out loud at the irony of his canned question but there is a word blocking any such outburst: prison. I try to remember where I keep my passport. Is it in the carriage house out back or is it among the things at our house — at Khanya's house — on the other side of town? I wonder if I have enough money to make it to the border of Swaziland and whether or not they will let me cross.
"Mr. Wilderson, I said Nelson Mandela thinks you're a —"
"Yes ... I heard you."
* * *
Sometimes, as I close my eyes to look at the sun or simply at the bulb in the lamp of my study, I see roses exploding one after another on my eyelids' inner canvas. But if I hold them closed too long, the roses melt with the bursts that bore them and I see flowers of a different kind, that bed of shy carnations and pungent chrysanthemums upon which professor Mureinik died. I see where his crumpled body has been removed. All that remains, besides the spectacles flung into the flowers on impact, are indentations of soil as though a two-toed ungulate tantrumed about in one place. I see empty bottles of prescription pills in Etienne Mureinik's suite on the 23 floor and the "important documents" soon after impounded by the authorities. From this rich and subtle world the professor prepares to descend. Now rising, now airborne, now falling ... a life opens ... it opens ... it is breaking ...
I once asked Stimela Mosando point blank if I — if we — had killed professor Etienne Mureinik. Stimela was a thin Motswana man of medium height and sparkling eyes. His lean physique made it hard for me to think of him as a man who'd been trained in hand-to-hand combat in Libya, and who had used that training to take down Red Beard, a strapping Afrikaner from Special Branch, in thirty seconds flat. He looked more like a swimmer than a guerilla, much less an Umkhonto we Sizwe commander. And because he did not wear horn-rimmed spectacles like his younger cousin Jabu, or sit for hours pensively contemplating indecipherable mathematical equations (my jaundiced image of an engineer), I often forgot that he had also been trained in some obscure discipline that combined telecommunications with electrical engineering when MK sent him to the Soviet Union. He looked like an ordinary guy from the township. In response to my question he threw his head back and laughed in a way that soft-spoken Motswana men were not, supposedly, known for.
I'd been told that such raucous outbursts were what one could and should expect from Zulus but not from Motswanas. When Khanya and I were still engaged — it was either two days after Christmas in 1989, or two days after New Year's in 1990, though the holiday now fails memory — we drove from Pretoria to Botswana on a whim. I recall clearly that it was during the time when I still had a pocketful of US dollars (dollars that, in those last years of apartheid, I often tried to buy our way out of our black skins by buying our way into restaurants or lodgings beneath signs that read Not Multiracial or Right of Refusal Reserved). She wanted to show me how her people, the Motswana, lived when they were not under the boot of apartheid. I had been reluctant to go, for no good reason, or none that I can recall. But her older sister, who was under house arrest at the time for having traveled to Zimbabwe to see her boyfriend, a militant in the Pan Africanist Congress, and thus could go nowhere, said, "Go, go, you must go to Botswana. When you cross the border you will smell the freedom!"
At the customs house, a small, hot pavilion in the middle of a desert road, two Botswanan guards had just shared a joke at which one of them was still laughing with the sprawling abandon of Stimela's laugh when I asked him if we had killed Mureinik. A woman who was old enough to be Khanya's mother but only old enough to be my older sister had the misfortune of having to stand at the counter and wait for the two customs officers to finish savoring their private joke, to wait for the one who could not stop laughing to dry his eyes and peruse her documents. When she turned from the window her face registered every emotion from exasperation to disgust. She spoke under her breath in Setswana to Khanya who, because she was facing the customs officers and had yet to have her documents approved, remained as placid and as non-responsive as possible. When we were cleared and had stepped over the line into Botswana, when we could finally smell the freedom, I asked Khanya to translate what the woman had said. "She said: 'The way they laugh you'd think they were Zulus. I can't believe I'm coming home.'" The woman would have been equally dismayed had she heard Stimela's laugh: not like a soft gust of wind and sand on a gentle desert night, the quiet, unassuming laugh, no doubt, of the man whom she had probably married and raised a family with, but a laugh like a Zulu.
"You're greedy," Stimela said. "A greedy capitalist. You want a little something for yourself; something that you can take back to America. But I'll tell you this," he added, "Etienne Mureinik killed Chris Hani."
The only thing that startled me more than Stimela's accusation that professor Mureinik murdered Chris Hani was my transparency, my neediness. It embarrassed me, for I did want something for myself, something to authenticate my involvement with him, and with his cousin Jabu, my ex-student Trevor, with Precious, and with Oupa (yes, even with Oupa). Something tangible, a representation from what Precious had called the three theaters: propaganda, psychological warfare, and operations: the shrunken head of a White man to hang from my belt. A little something for myself. Precious had demarcated and named three theaters not because they could be marked, named, and separated but because she knew that that was what I needed. They were all like that; even Jabu who gave me what I needed not by fabricating an answer but by asking me another question, thereby soothing my anxiety with the sound of my own voice. Their answers to my questions were cushions of stability, what I needed to go on fighting, that would be pulled from under me just when I'd settled on a clear, coherent, and respectable narrative of who we were and what we were about.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Incognegro by Frank B. Wilderson III. Copyright © 2008 Frank B. Wilderson, III. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Cover Title Copyright Dedication Part One Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Part Two Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Glossary AcknowledgmentsWhat People are Saying About This
"Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word."
"Fast-paced, critical, humorous, hilarious at times, Incognegro asks provocative questions about post-Apartheid South Africa and post-civil rights America with all the passion, the drama, and the political clarity of a great autobiography. With perspectives from different times and places in the two continents, and with an unerring eye and ear for a telling detail and image, Frank Wilderson brings a novelistic and dramatic imagination to a story of our times. It is a multi-layered narrative of a life molded in struggles for human dignity in America and Africa, at once a gripping story of racial politics and a biography of his soul."
"Into the wake of great literature fighting human bondage, Frank Wilderson pours Incognegro. And, like the offerings of Ellison, Fanon, Baldwin, and Morrison, this revolutionary love story must be widely read, generously shared, and relentlessly engaged."