Catching a Feeling

Eve has asked her readers to write about their childhood. I thought I would give it a try, because I can’t resist a challenge that is as well-written as this:

If you read here regularly, I wonder if you’d indulge me by thinking about your own childhoods, going back to the flow of days during which nothing much happened, but when the passing of time nurtured and fed you. You’ll know which days I mean by finding strings of days, days on end, whose memory causes a wave of nostalgia to overcome you. Days that now fill you with longing, or a pang of loss, deep joy, or deep gratitude. Sometimes you may think of them and feel great sorrow over something you’ve lost. Maybe it was days you spent with your grandparents, or days you spent at home doing nothing; a day with your brother or sister, a family vacation. Think back to the hours or days when life felt like an afternoon in a hammock, or time on a quilt under a tree with your very best friend.

Think about it, or feel your way back to it, and write it out for yourself. I don’t mean you have to write about it here, as a comment, or even on your own blog; but I do want you to write about it. Get it down somehow when your level of feeling or emotion (affect) rises up and squeezes you in the middle of your chest, right around your heart, and you begin to feel a little weepy or giddy. Right . . . there. That’s the part we want. Catch it like a firefly in a jar, and get very close to that feeling, and then write about it. Write it all out, the memories surrounding it: where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, what it smelled, tasted, and sounded like there; how long did it last?

The Angel in the Garden

When my father left in a storm of self-justification and golf clubs, my grandmother moved into the cottage at the bottom of our garden. It was like having an angel of our own living there. My brother and I would wake in the morning and race our beaten path to her front door, where she would open up, catch us in her arms and breathe, “Hello my darlings!” as if she hadn’t seen us for a month. While my mother was dealing with her own pain and sorrow, and gradually finding her way back to herself, my grandmother gathered us into a gentle place of wonder that offered us refuge from our pain. She had a naivete that spoke to my child’s heart, and taught us how to be silent and listen to the self within, how to shape clouds, how to appreciate an egg sandwich, to believe in fairies. Under her guidance, I developed an interest in other realms and soon our garden became, for me, a magical fairyland that was bustling with activity and solace from the pain of my parent’s separation.

This fairyland was closely tied with the plant life in the garden, starting with the enormous camphor tree that towered over us like a gentle giant. I climbed into his arms, and found comfort there, staring at the leaf patterns and imagining myself on a ship sailing across oceans, or in a palace, or in village of busy elves. I lost time there as I watched ants trace paths across the tree’s rippled bark, or listened to the doves high above, or felt the wind sough mournfully in the branches. The tree reflected my mood: he was sad if I was sad, content if I was so, but his depth of feeling was so great that after a while I could bear his compassion no longer and had to seek more light-hearted magic elsewhere.

Ivy covered the camphor tree’s earthbound roots - the perfect place for fairies to cavort. I imagined them climbing the roots and chasing each other under the green pointed umbrellas of ivy leaves. The Japanese anenomes planted nearby were special since they flowered around my mother’s birthday, and their ivory petals and fluffy yellow centres brought to mind elegant fairy princesses, wafting through my fairyland in white gowns with golden crowns. They were beautiful, and slightly removed, rather like my mother, and I couldn’t spend too much time with them without the sadness edging in.

Following the path of the anenomes, I would arrive at a bed of flowers planted by my mother that curved out into the garden like a headland or peninsula. This buttress was seldom shadowed by the tree, so it was a sunny place for both children and fairies. Roses encouraged the arrival of pink and white fairies, bold and laughing. They were enticed by the dripping tap that stood in the flower-bed, and would recline underneath the tiny waterfall and catch drips directly into their mouths. The tap also attracted an old fat frog, who croaked grumpily as dusk fell. Here in this sunny bed, I created fairy gardens, small flat patches of earth, surrounded by stone walls and decorated with flower furniture. I knew that when the moon rose and I was in bed, the fairies would be sleeping on an azalea or camellia petal and thanking me for their comfort.

Following the bed, I came up against a wooden fence, behind which lived our mad and muttering neighbour and her barking dog. If I came too close to the fence, the dog would unleash its volley of angry remarks and I would have to retreat to underneath the lemon tree for safety. It was fragrant and citrussy there, but the ground beneath was littered with rotting lemons which were revolting if I stood on them with bare feet.

Behind the lemon tree was a green wire fence covered with jasmine, and behind that a lowered area where our maid washed and hung the washing to dry. I would climb the fence, sit on the hot and crumbling stairs and watch in a dream as the washing swirled on the windy drier. The maid lived there too, in a room that smelled of soap, sweat and putu - the porridge that she liked to eat and sometimes shared with me, if I was lucky. There weren’t fairies here - it was somehow too jagged a place - but her bed was on bricks in case of the tokoloshe. There was mystery in the bamboo fence below her khaya that separated our house from those neighbours. I could walk between the tall bamboo and the fence, and be transported to a world where plants were huge and people tiny.

Following this fence, I would come upon a green patch of lawn where our jungle gym had once stood, before it grew rickety and dangerous and had to be taken away. There was my grandmother’s cottage, with the door always open. She would be reading, or painting, or gently napping, but was always welcoming to her small visitors and would find us a piece of hazelnut chocolate from her secret stash. In front of the cottage stood a bank of strelitzias, flowers which my mother dismissed as ugly and African, but which were fascinatingly bird-like. I could crawl under the bushes and hide there, enjoying the feeling of separate nearness to my family. Usually the corgi, Muffin, would snuffle me out or my little brother would crash in, demanding that I play a game with him.

Sometimes my grandmother would get a blanket and we would lie on the sunny grass, looking up at the clouds. She would show us how to shape clouds, and we would get lost in the mystery of the sky. I think both my brother and I learnt early, and from her, to take responsibility for the shape of our lives. We were taught not to feel buffetted by fate, but that our thoughts could shape our lives and that every event, no matter how sad or sick inside it made us feel, happened for a reason. Then our mother would bring out a tray of a tea and biscuits, I would put the tea cosy on my head to make everyone laugh and my brother would run off to hit a tennis ball against the wall, all life’s lessons forgotten.

Cold Comfort

A year ago, deep in the heart of Europe, while driving through the continent’s longest tunnel as my family slept around me, I made a decision that was momentous for me. It had been silting up for years, but as the weight of the Swiss Alps pressed down on my family, I decided that, although I love my homeland and although my soul will always be South African, I will never live there again. The tunnel was long, straight and well-lit, and I wept as I drove. I kept the decision locked into my heart, not wanting to verbalise it, because that would make it too real. Today, I’ve cried again, all day long with bitter tears as the nail was banged into the coffin of my decision.

In September 2006, 100-year-old Herbert James “Bob” Downs was stabbed several times in the home which he built and where he had lived for 72 years. His murderer stole a television from him, which he later sold for R150 (€12). Sibusiso Mbuje Dlamini (29) was caught later that day, wearing a pair of Bob’s favourite shoes. There have been many murders in South Africa, countless murders, some perpetrated by the apartheid government, others perpetrated by the freedom movement and others by ordinary citizens. Every murder is tragic, but the murder of Bob Downs caught my heart. He was the grandfather of a schoolfriend of mine, and had recently celebrated his 100th birthday surrounded by his loving family: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His granddaughter, K, had sent me photos of that lovely day. One picture that stays with me is of Bob, sitting amongst rows of his family, under the generous arms of a tree, the green lawns of someone’s home stretching out into the landscape of KwaZulu-Natal, the land that is etched into my heart. The joy that radiated from them made me cry. I felt, selfishly and briefly, robbed. Shortly afterwards, he was murdered.

This week, Dlamini was sentenced. He got life, plus ten. Cold comfort for Bob Downs’ family.

If you are feeling brave, look at Bob’s face here. See the wisdom in his wrinkles and the kindness in his clear blue eyes, which are those of a much younger man. When I looked at this photograph, over a year ago, I knew that I could not live in a country where a life as well-lived and good as his is so cheap. I made my decision and I held onto it in silence.

Last night, I was contacted by a young South African woman, who found me through my blog. Her husband is of German extraction. They are considering selling everything and immigrating to Germany. We spoke on the phone for a long time, and I heard the same sadness in her voice: how she loves her country, how she lives in fear, how the stress is affecting her whole family and how they are going to take the biggest risk of their lives and move. And I counselled her to do it. Germany, I said, is stable. It is green, healthy, safe, child-friendly and kind. As I said those words, my heart tore a little more. She is born and bred South African like me, whose parents are South African like mine. Her father runs a small supermarket and, she says, in order to be safe, his own private army. “Going to the supermarket there is like going into Belfast. Soldiers everywhere.”

This morning, I drove past green hills and thought how blessed I am to have landed in this safe, green place. The Heidelberg hills are so beautiful, gentle and rolling, filled with surprises like ruined castles and winding rivers. They will never be mine. They will never attach themselves to my heart with barbs that cannot be loosened. If my soul had to choose between the green hills of Heidelberg and the yellow grass of the Drakensberg, my soul would choose the latter. I dream of the smell of the air in Cape Town, and wake up with my pillow wet.

My mother and I have been having these phone-calls. We skirt the topic, we tease around its edges. For a year, we have been approaching it. And then today I said it. I said, “Tones, I’m never coming home.” And then I cried and cried. Somehow, when you tell your mother, then it is real, almost too real to bear. Since then, I have been crying and I can’t stop. It’s cold comfort for my mother that we are safe here, cold comfort for me that my life is stable and kind, cold comfort for my children that they have freedoms unimaginable to kids of their age in South Africa, but see their grandparents once a year.

My heart is breaking. I am never going home. My beloved country, exactly that of Alan Paton’s, land of yellow grass, duikers, vervet monkeys, sardine runs, dark palaces of thunderstorms, crocheted doilies weighted down with stones, the smell of mutton, rusks dipped into sweet tea, people who shout hello to each other, will always be a holiday destination for me. I am filled with love and admiration for those who stay, for those who still believe in South Africa’s future. They are brave and their courage astounds me. I can’t be that brave.

More on Privilege

A few days ago I did the Privilege meme, devised by PhD students at Illinois State University as way to get people thinking and talking about privilege as a way to think and talk about class. The model is US-centric, which I found doing it, as a couple of questions weren’t relevant to me or the education system I came from. I did it out of interest anyway, but came away with a sense of unease that it hadn’t begun to reflect the privileges I grew up with in apartheid South Africa. Mandarine noticed this and commented:

This is sobering indeed. Especially when I consider that I used to believe South African whites were all spoilt kids, but that I score much higher (25/34) than you (18/34) on this ‘test’.

Actually Mandarine, white South Africans were all spoilt kids. I’ve devised some additional questions to the meme, which do reveal the level of our privilege.

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. You had live-in domestic help when growing up.
Until my parents were divorced and then we had a domestic worker who came Monday to Friday. She bussed into the city from an outlying township.
2. That help was expected to clean house and take care of small children simultaneously.
Absolutely. I was strapped on the back of my nanny while she swept and cleaned.
3. You had two domestic workers: someone to clean the house and someone whose sole responsibility was child-care.
4. There was additional part-time domestic help in your home: someone to assist with domestic chores such as ironing or someone to garden.
Yes, a gardener came a couple of days a week.
5. You were not expected to take responsibility for any domestic chores.
I learnt how to cook and how to operate a washing machine at university. I was not expected to do any chores at home, though I did help my mother clear the dishes in the evenings when our domestic worker had gone home.
6. Your schooling received more government funding than the schooling of others.
7. Your tertiary education received more government funding than the schooling of others.
8. The training of your teachers and professors received more government funding than the teacher training of others.
9. Your schools had better facilities than the schools of others.
10. You lived in suburbs with running water, electricity, large houses and big gardens; suburbs where others were forbidden by law from living.
11. On leaving school or university, you were more likely to be hired for the job of your choice than others.
12. You presumed you would enter a profession on leaving university; blue-collar work was never an option for you.
I began working in 1992, and in 1994 the new government started its affirmative action programme for people who were previously disadvantaged. Had I stayed in South Africa, I would probably have had to work for myself or start my own company as most of my friends have done. Luckily, their privileged education means they have the tools and the wherewithal to do this.
13. You or your parents did not have to travel long distances to work because your suburb was near the city centre.
14. You did not have to travel long distances to school because there were many schools in your suburb.
15. You routinely went on holiday to the beach or the game reserve.
16. Your parents or friends’ parents routinely had overseas holidays.

In apartheid South Africa, privilege was bound up less with class than with race. It’s become more class-related now, as a black professional middle-class that enjoys many of the above privileges grows. However, as a product of apartheid, I have to acknowledge that I was unfairly privileged above others on the superficial basis of my skin.

When Ordinary People Speak

While Thabo Mbeki might be dancing around skittishly and refusing to condemn his comrade Robert Mugabe’s latest violation of democracy in Zimbabwe, ordinary South Africans are speaking out. There is a shipment of Chinese arms and ammunition waiting in Durban harbour, which has been approved by the South African government for transit to land-locked Zimbabwe. There are already rumours of violence by Mugabe’s henchman, and there is every chance that the three million rounds of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades will be used against ordinary, innocent Zimbabwean citizens whose chance of democratically electing their own government appears to have been wrenched from them.

While the South African government has approved the transit, the dockworkers who belong to the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (SATAWU) have refused to unload the cargo.

The Times quotes SATAWU spokesperson Randall Howard as saying, “We do not believe it will be in the interest of the Zimbabwean people in general if South Africa is seen to be a conduit of arms and ammunition into Zimbabwe at a time when the situation could be described as quite volatile.”

Hooray for the unionists! How wonderful to see ordinary South Africans standing up for ordinary Zimbabweans despite the intransigence of both governments.

Long live the workers, long live!

(For more details, read the whole Times article here.)

Sizwe’s Test

I’ve just finished this book by prize-winning South African journalist Jonny Steinberg in less than a day, and I have to confess I’m stunned by its vision, intelligence and compassion. Marketed in South Africa as The Three-Letter Plague (a title I prefer), Sizwe’s Test is subtitled A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic. What Steinberg does is to follow two people - spaza shop owner Sizwe Magadla and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctor Hermann Reuter - during a two-year period in which the former tries to decide whether to test for AIDS or not, and the latter does his utmost to provide AIDS testing and treatment in Lusikisiki, one of South Africa’s poorest and most remote districts. What Steinberg does so well is to empathise with both men and the adversity that they face, so that, as a reader, I understood both Sizwe’s intricate cultural difficulties with acknowledging AIDS and Hermann’s Herculean challenge in ensuring adequate services for the poverty-stricken people of Lusikisiki.

A third character who Steinberg encounters during his visits to the area is self-appointed community health worker Kate Marrandi. Unlike the two men, Kate is not young. She is not rich like Sizwe (he runs a small shop out of his two-roomed house and is considering buying a car, which makes him a wealthy man in his village), nor highly-educated like Hermann, but she is singled-handedly getting the people of her village who are HIV-positive onto antiretrovirals (ARVs) and watching them come back to life. Kate’s success is due, much like Hermann’s, to the fact that she is an outsider. She is a Zulu, not Xhosa, and has stayed behind in Lusikisiki to serve the people after her devout husband has returned to KwaZulu-Natal to proselytize for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Sizwe, on the other hand, is not an outsider. He grew up in the village where he now lives. For him to take an HIV test and to live with the potential outcome of that would be a threat to everything he is: a self-made man, a father, a husband, a son. Throughout the book, Sizwe’s intelligence shines through. Steinberg says of him:

His interest in me was neither watchful nor suspicious; I had arrived from a world he knew little about, and he wanted to imagine the place I had come from. By the time we reached his parents’ homestead I liked him. He possessed a curiosity both rare and distinctive; one recognizes it the moment one sees it. It is the curiosity of a person who has no interest in confusing the boundaries between himself and others, who does not identify or envy too much.

Sizwe’s curiosity takes him along on Steinberg’s journeys through the district, sometimes as translator and sometimes as observer. His understanding of the function of ARVs grows and yet he remains reluctant to test. By testing and potentially being found HIV-positive, Sizwe will have to acknowledge his promiscuous past, he believes he would lose his business and not be able to support his family, and thus never be able to pay the bride-price for his lover Nwabisa and give their son his own name. While Sizwe understands intellectually that ARVs can keep the sick alive for many years, his culture provides an impediment to his taking the test.

Steinberg shows how Sizwe sits on the cusp between old and new: he sits between the peasant society his parents grew up in and the modern new world where technology can save lives, between poverty and relative comfort, between the traditional requirements of manhood and a new, more enlightened way. At one point, Nwabisa has to give up work to stay home and care for their child, and Sizwe agrees to pay her the salary she has lost, plus an extra 15%. This is a world where women are changing too. Steinberg describes a support group meeting for people on ARVs where women discuss loudly and in public the nature of female desire, complaining that they may not always have condoms to hand when they are in the mood.

Hermann Reuter’s challenge, on the other hand, is to entrench the services he designs so that when he and MSF pull out and hand over to provincial government, they will continue. His goal is to show that if you provide decent treatment, people will come and get it. His triumph does come: a few months after he leaves, the South African government decides that nurses can dispense ARVs, which means that people can receive their treatment in community clinics and not at far-flung hospitals. At the end of the book Steinberg says his goal was tell a story of AIDS treatment, and that there is no reason to see Hermann Reuter as emblematic of the quest to heal a country of AIDS, nor to see Sizwe’s reactions as typical of ordinary people. However, he couldn’t help seeing the two allegorically - a doctor and a potential patient in the theatre of a battle against a pernicious epidemic.

Sizwe’s Test reads easily and well. It is intimate in its insights, but broad in its perspective. I would strongly recommend it for anyone wanting to see the human side of the AIDS epidemic. I also recommend it for Jonny Steinberg’s superbly strong writing. The dust jacket calls it a “tour de force of literary journalism”, and it is.

Hooray for the Cooksister!

Thanks to everyone who voted for me in the South African Blog Awards. The award for the best South African overseas blog was given to my friend Jeanne who writes the fabulous Cook Sister! blog. She also won best SA food blog. Jeanne is a wonderful food writer, who is intelligent and funny, and one day she’s going to publish a food book that I’m going to love as much as I love Nigella Lawson’s and Nigel Slater’s cookery books.

Go forth and read the Cook Sister. You will be so glad you did.

Red and Green II

The image is not so pretty, today. Red and green describes the colour of my eyes. I woke to find them greenly glued together, and when I finally prised them open, the insides were red. So after dropping my people at their various Higher Institutes of Craft-Making and Fun-Having, I went to the doctor. There I sat and I sat and I sat. I sat for two and a half hours, amongst moaning pensioners, expectorating teenagers and quietly wilting people of the middle years. Once I finally had the attention of a doctor, I was told it was a virus and that I need to go home, take paracetamol and rest. I basked in the light of his wisdom for a full three minutes. All in all, not a satisfying experience.

Damn, I’m cross. Cross at the waste of my time (I read my book, but still, the principle!), cross that I’m sick, cross that I can’t rest, cross that I can’t go to gym, cross that I have a precious 12 hours a week to myself and that today’s three hour allocation was balled up into a doctor’s prescription and tossed into a sanitised bin. He offered me a doctor’s note, and then when I said I work from home, made his swiftly becoming unfunny joke that there’s no being written off sick for mothers. Ha! I laughed not!

I’m fantasising about sending my children to a school with longer hours, about committing the sin of not providing a hot lunch, about having a bit more time to myself. We had dinner with newly-arrived US friends on Friday and I was explaining how school only lasts until 12.20 because the entire fabric of German society is based on the hot lunch.

Friend’s husband: So what do you give them in summer?

Me: A slightly cooler lunch.

Cheer me up, won’t you? See that shiny little badge over there on the right? Please go and vote for me in the category Best Overseas South African blog. That would really make my day and I promise to stop complaining about my health and my very extremely tough lot in life if you do. While you’re there, you could vote for my friends the fabulous Cooksister and the inspiring Vanielje Kitchen too, but save a little vote for me and my red-and-green eyes.

While you do, I’ll just lie here in the foetal position, groaning slightly. Then I’ll slap myself and go and tidy up the remains of Hot Lunch #1,026 (sausages, carrots and new potatoes).

10 Signs a Book Might be Written by Me

Having acknowledged that I have seven outstanding memes to do, my fancy has been taken by this one, which I have seen at the Hobgoblin’s, Dorothy’s and most lately at Emily’s blog. I think it’s because I am deep into writing a book that this seems particularly apposite.

10 Signs a Book Might be Written by Me

1. It will be a novel set in South Africa

2. There will be place detail: smells, sounds, sights, animals, landscape, weather

3. There will be at least one corrupt politician

4. There will be lots of characters, and I mean lots. As one of my cheerleaders said, “You’ve even got a backstory for the guy who runs the local corner shop.”

5. There will be some death, some love and some sex, but not too much

6. There won’t be any magic realism, teenage vampires, or confounding mysteries

7. There will be strong women and patriarchs

8. The prose will be story-driven

9. There will be large, complicated families

10. It will not be sentimental or rose-tinted

I tag Ms Tea Stains, Helen (if she hasn’t already done this), JadePark, Nova, (Un)Relaxeddad and Mortal Mom

Half of a Yellow Sun

Shortly before Christmas, the charismatic Jacob Zuma won the leadership of the ANC from under the nose of South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki. Where Zuma is a people’s person, educated by the university of life and a champion of the poor, Mbeki is cold, intellectual and apparently incapable of showing compassion to those who suffer. Zuma is also a Zulu, South Africa’s largest ethnic group, while Mbeki is Xhosa - the same tribe as Nelson Mandela. Zuma was acquitted of rape in 2006, but is due to stand trial for corruption later this year. It has not taken South Africa’s political analysts long to begin imagining the worst case scenarios should the popular ANC leader be found guilty. Taken alongside the violent protests against Kenya’s apparently rigged elections, it is clear that in Africa tribal loyalties are not to be taken lightly.

How strange then, to have this so acutely in mind as I read Chimimanda’s Ngozi Adichie’s brilliant Half of a Yellow Sun. The novel takes a group of characters through the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70, where after a short-lived coup by Igbo officers in the Nigerian army, Igbo people living in the north of Nigeria were sought out and massacred. The Igbo responded by declaring their southern part of the country an independent state, which they called Biafra. Blockaded and bombed, they were eventually overpowered and Biafra was returned to Nigeria. However, the Nigerians’ most powerful weapon against the Biafrans was starvation, and the enduring image of that war is of tiny children, with the sticklike limbs and severely bloated bellies that denote kwashiorkor, or malnutrition.

While Adichie admits in the author interview at the back of my copy of the book that she changed certain small details, she remains true to the central events of the time. In this way, Half of a Yellow Sun was a history lesson for me - it brought to life a war that was happening as I was conceived and born, a war that for me was more the haunting eyes of starvation than the attempts of a people to create their own nation. But it is so much more than the dry bones of history. Adichie fleshes out her story with a set of characters as different from each other as their human need to survive is the same.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of three people. There is Ugwu, the houseboy brought in from the country to tend to the needs of the professor Odenigbo. Ugwu is about thirteen (no-one is really sure) and has passed the equivalent of Grade Four, but shows such a natural intelligence in his tasks that the professor allows him to continue his education. While this education happens largely offstage, Ugwu’s growing understanding of the world around him, of people, his compassion and love for the family that he serves clearly indicates his progression. Late in the novel, he joins his mistress Olanna in teaching children in the refugee camp where the family work - a development that shows he is no longer servile but a beloved equal.

Olanna, daughter of a chief, is the novel’s second main protagonist. She disdains the wealth and rarefied social life her parents offer her to live in the provincial town of Nsukka with her “revolutionary lover” Odenigbo and teach in the university there. She swallows her pride to adopt Odenigbo’s love-child, Baby, to whom she and Ugwu both become devoted slaves. While she adores her husband, she watches with a distaste that is hard to contain as his revolutionary fervour becomes fervour for alcohol. Odenigbo, it seems, is one of those hardline theorists whose theories drift away like gunpowder after the first shots are fired. It was not that she wanted him to go to war to prove his love for her, but that the war, and Biafra’s losing of it, took away from him the strength and manliness that in peacetime he appeared to possess.

The third protagonist is the Englishman, Richard, who drifts to Nigeria in the guise of being a writer. He very soon becomes enamoured of Olanna’s powerful and enigmatic sister Kainene, and shifts away from the superficial expat world of parties, cocktails and sexual favours to be her live-in lover. They never marry, but he turns to calling her his wife. Richard loves the Igbo, their culture and customs, and during the war is used by the army as a one-man propaganda machine. He is the outsider dying to be the insider, and he proves his devotion by staying the course of the war instead running away with the other expats. He speaks the language of the Igbo and speaks for the Igbo as a writer.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a hard book to read in that the descriptions of suffering are acute and painful. Rape - a ghastly tool of war - is also present, as are starvation, tragedy and deprivation. But Adichie’s characters are redemptive as they survive and cope, by helping others and receiving help from those more fortunate than themselves. Olanna and Kainene start the book disengaged from each other, become estranged during the course of the story and then are bound together once again in twinship and kinship. They build around themselves a small tribe of husbands, children and servants, as well the desperately ill and dying for whom they care in the refugee camp. I hope I’m not misrepresenting the book: while the subject matter is tough and Adichie does not flinch from addressing it, it is thread through with a sly and teasing humour. (At one point, Kainene says of Harrison, her houseboy, who cooks up some lizards for the family: ‘”You’d think it was roast beef, the way he’s going on about it.”‘)

Adichie is a powerful writer. Her prose never flags; it is glittering and strong. Here is a passage where Alice, a neighbour, discovers that her family have all been killed in her hometown:

She was strengthened, emboldened, by the madness of grief and she fought off everyone who tried to hold her. She rolled on the ground with such force that the stones cut her skin in tiny red gashes. The neighbours said oh and shook their heads. Odenigbo came out of the room then and went over and picked Alice up and held her, and she stayed still and began to weep, her head resting on his shoulder. Olanna watched them. There was a familiar melding to the curve of Odenigbo’s arms around Alice. He held her with the ease of someone who had held her before.

There are two things happening here. Firstly, the tiny gashes on Alice’s skin echo the machete wounds which Olanna witnesses when members of her family are murdered in the north at the beginning of the novel. The horror of war is underscored once again for Olanna, while simultaneously she realises that her husband has been sleeping with Alice. For Olanna, the degradation of war and the humiliation of her husband being unfaithful to her are one.

Aidichie says fiction is the soul of history, and this is what she achieves in her wonderful book: bringing humanity and soul to an African conflict that has long been relegated to the history books. She wraps and envelops you in her story, and sweeps you along inexorably to the end. I had the shivery feeling throughout that I was watching the birth of a classic, and I am delighted beyond adequate expression that Africa has produced another writer of her calibre and sensitivity. I think this book will be taught in schools and universities along with other classics from the continent such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. I hope that one day a writer with as fine an eye, as clear a voice and as great compassion will write a book about South Africa’s recent past, bringing soul and humanity to my country’s history.

This is my first book of 2008. I have no doubt that at the end of this year, it will be one of my favourites.

RIP, Tony Shelembe (A 30th Story of AIDS)

Today I am honoured to have my first-ever guest post. Please meet my new-found friend Daniela Gennrich. Daniela worked closely with Tony Shelembe, and nursed him at her home along with his fiance, Pretty, during his last hours. In this article, which was published on Saturday, 1 December in The Natal Witness, Daniela interviews people who knew Tony well, including his mother, his fiance and his daughter.

A True South African Hero
by Daniela Gennrich

The sister at the local clinic looks up wearily, and surveys the queue snaking out of the main door onto the road. It’s going to be another long day…

“Next…” A young man approaches. “Sawubona Sister”.
“Yebo Boetie. What’s the problem?”

The somewhat sickly looking man explains that he has a persistent headache, and his abdomen is distended, or swollen. The sister puts on her stethoscope and listens briefly to his chest, takes his pulse and blood pressure, and sends him off with a small plastic packet with the word ‘Painadol’ written on it.

“OK - Next…”

A tired, careless moment, a missed opportunity to diagnose a life-threatening condition…

Just over a month later, Tony Shelembe became one of the death statistics for November 2007, one of the perhaps 1800 who will have died before the month is out.

But who was this man?

As I sat in his house the other day surrounded by his family and friends, the rain pelting down on the corrugated iron roof, I noticed a faded photo of a 14-year-old Tony, and asked people what they remembered about him. This is some of what I heard.

A grandson:
“I cannot eat when I think of my little grandson. Who is going to take of care of me when I am sick? Who is going to look after the cows and the goats for me? I should have gone before you. Who is going to bury me now?”

A son:
“I am Tony’s mother. Tony was very helpful, at home and in the community. He loved his children very much, they were very important to him, but all children were important to him. This is a very great loss. Everyone will miss him.”

“He was not talkative and didn’t fight. He loved to braai meat outside on a Sunday. He was often making jokes. One day when he was 14 and I still had a car, he just took it and drove away. But he was humble and just said ‘I am sorry, dad’. He could not resist driving!”

A brother:
“He was always there for me when we were growing up.”

A father:
“My dad was so kind. He did all the things I wanted. The best part was when he used to take us kids to go swim in the river. He bought me a bike for Christmas.”

An athlete and a role model:
“My dad was a marathon runner. He got three Comrades medals, and eight others for running. He won three gold medals for his soccer team.”

A community leader:
“He was a good leader. I always remember Tony with his smile. I remember the work he has done with us in the community since 2000. I remember when the committee was divided, and some wanted to follow Sthembile and others wanted to follow Prudence. And Tony said “No, this thing is too big, we have to continue the work, however scary it is”. And we have continued to work until now. The stigma is less, and more people come forward for help. Tony left us in the middle, but we know that God is there…”

“He was like a son to me, chatting about his future and where he wanted to go. He wanted to be an NGO director and quietly went about making it happen. Working day to day to make a difference, it was never about the money or the status, always about how things would change.”

A caregiver:
“He was not like other men. He helped orphans talk about their sadness, helped gogos looking after their grandchildren. How many men have that gift to give children?” (A community member)

“Tony used to come straight away when we called for help. He used to drive us to hospital when we were sick. But he was not like a taxi driver. He used to talk to us to help us not to be afraid.” (A gogo in the community)

“He helped me to take my medication correctly – what will I do now?” (Young woman in the community)

A friend:
“I remember his dedication. His respect for the young and the old, his smile, his tiny body, his funny caps and his good heart.”

“He was many things in one. He was there for everyone, mothers, children, friends. Whatever he put his mind to, it became possible. Even though things were a struggle he never accepted failure and always found a way forward. He never lost hope.”

“He was not afraid to confront you when things went wrong, to honestly work things out.”

A lover and a husband-to-be:
“I fell in love with Tony on the 9th August 2004, when we were both doing home based care training in Howick. One day he took me to uMngeni River and he told me he wanted to marry me. I did not agree. He begged me until I finally agreed. He has just finished paying my mother lobola (bride price) for me. We have started wedding preparations. Next month we were going to collect our rings at the jewellery shop, and we were paying off a bedroom suite.

Then he got sick. But he never gave up hope. I remember one day when he was very sick, he tried to get up and go to work. He loved his job.

He also loved talking with me about our future and our babies. I miss his smile. When he called my name, he said ‘love’. Everywhere I go he still goes with me. I wish someone could bring him back to me.”

His vision for his community?
I remember he said: “ This community is going to have a vibrant economy and there will be no more unemployment. And most of all, there will be no HIV stigma and we will be free. If I die, please don’t let anyone say it was nthakathi (witchcraft). Tell them I was just sick.”

The Hilton Valley Committee chair has committed to continue working to fulfil his vision. Even though they have very little funding, they have vision and they have hope.

So, who was this man, passed over so easily by the Health System?

The answer is best summed up in the words of his daughter Luyanda, as I was bringing her back from shopping yesterday, when she saw Tony’s cousin in the distance: “Look, look! Daddy IS here! … Oh no, sorry – I forgot ….”

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Tony’s memorial service was today. My mother baked scones and with Daniela, collected Tony’s family and drove them to the community hall where the service took place. She said many people spoke, and she was deeply moved by the beautiful singing of African hymns, where one voice begins and then others join in in parallel harmonies. She met all the people who loved Tony and who mourn him so deeply.

My Toni was also relieved to hear that Tony’s community are going to try to help Sambeka, who lives 10 kilometres away and who was one of the many people with AIDS that Tony was helping. Community members will drive her to the clinic so that she and her baby son get the treatment they so desperately need.

I am gaining faith in the amazing networks built by ordinary people who find the compassion in their hearts to help each other. But it is nevertheless a tragedy that such a wonderful man had to die because the health system was too overwhelmed, overworked and weak to save his life.