middle to fend me off, like this, and hold the other stick near the bottom to use as a weapon, like that.”
Sipho knew Job pretended to lose that fight, but he thought his heart would burst with pride. Until he saw his father shaking his head as he walked away.
“Our father thinks fighting’s stupid,” Mzi explained to Job. “He says we should sort things by talking. Our uncles think he’s soft in the head.”
Job had thought about this for a moment, and then gathered up the sticks and tucked them under his arm. “Maybe he’s not so soft in the head.”
When Mzi grew up he left home to work in a coal mine. Each Christmas he came home with a suitcase of presents. One year a letter came from the manager of the coal mine. Sipho’s father brought the letter home from the trading store, and handed it to Sipho. Sipho’s mother stood close.
“Read the letter, Sipho!” his father said.
Sipho opened the envelope and took out a single page and six five-pound notes. The ground heaved under his feet as he read the mine manager’s words.
*
Years later, on a summer afternoon, Sipho trudged slowly along a well-worn track through the veld. He wore Mzi’s jacket, which hung loose and baggy on his lanky frame. He walked with his head down and his shoulders hunched and he sighed as he looked at his bare feet.
I hope my children will have shoes to wear to my funeral.
Life had been so hard for them all, for so long. And now he had no one. Why, he wondered, was he thinking about shoes?
Behind him two mounds lay side by side on the hillside. His mother’s was covered in thick, green veld-grass, his father’s in raw earth. There was no mound for Mzi, who had died years before in a coal-mine fire.
There were no bodies. The fire burnt for three days, the mine manager had written in that pitiful letter.
“Thirty pounds for my son’s life! Sipho, promise me you will never work in a coal mine,” his grief-stricken mother had wailed.
After Mzi’s death she no longer sang as she worked. She’d gone to her thatch-roofed rondavel early every afternoon and lain on a grass mat. One day she couldn’t get up. Sipho’s father had thought she was dying of grief and anger. He’d laid her in the back of an ox-drawn cart and taken her over the hills to the mission hospital. The doctor had told him she had cancer and gave her a packet of painkillers. There was nothing they could do, he’d said.
So Sipho’s father had brought her home and she’d sunk back onto her grass mat.
Sipho had crouched next to her with a bowl of imasi, holding out a spoonful of the creamy curds. She had shaken her head and then, seeing his bleak look, patted his hand and murmured, “You’re growing to be a good, strong man like your brother was.”
But Mzi seemed to do most things effortlessly.
She’d sensed his thought and her voice was not much more than a sigh. “Perhaps you don’t know it, but I do.”
When she died the whole world seemed to mourn her. The winds that usually brought rain to the valley brought high, wispy clouds and then turned and blew the other way. There was no rain in the valley for two summers. Dry winds sent wildfires roaring over the hills and a dull haze of smoke and dust hung in the sky. The mealie plants grew knee-high and then withered. The grass that survived the fires did not make seed heads. Streams dried and cattle got thin, limping and foaming at the mouth.
On a hot, windy day two men from the government rode up on horseback. One of the men had been before. He was the extension officer who had persuaded all the farmers, black and white, on both sides of the great river, to dip their cattle to kill ticks, and to plough around the hill so summer storms did not wash away the topsoil. Sipho’s father knew and trusted him. The other man was a vet. The two men opened their saddle bags, took out white coats and long rubber gloves, and examined the sick animals.
Sipho heard the vet tell his father he would have to kill all his cattle.
Sipho’s father stared at him in disbelief.
“And burn the carcases. You cannot eat the meat or you’ll get ill. This is foot and mouth disease. We must stay and watch the cattle burn,” the vet had added.
Sipho’s father was angry. Just a few months earlier the government had taken good land from black farmers in other parts of the country. “Is this because we are black farmers? Does the government want to take our land now too?”
The extension officer put a hand on his shoulder. “Ndebele, this terrible disease does not notice colour. This is the only way to stop it – there is no medicine for it. Across the river we did the same. Some of the white farmers can’t pay what they owe the banks, and the banks have taken their farms. Those farmers have gone to Johannesburg to look for work.”
When the two men rode away the smell of burning bones and horns lingered in the valley, even inside the rondavels. Sipho’s father and his uncles, all the farmers in the valley, who had husbanded their abundant herds so well, and whose fat Nguni cattle had once dotted the hillsides, were left with nothing.
And then Sipho’s father had started to cough.
*
Leaving the graves, Sipho walked slowly to the homestead. His feet grew heavy and, when he reached the fence of prickly pear bushes, he stood at the opening and looked at his father’s empty rondavel. It had been so sudden. Two days ago the cough had got worse. By evening his father had struggled to breathe and then, just before dawn, his breathing had slowed and stopped.
Mzi. His mother. His father.
He had no one left.
His half-uncles were not friendly. And all Sipho had were empty grasslands. How would he find food? What could he do? When he tried to think about the future his mind slipped sideways. He wished he had not politely taken a sip of sorghum beer each time his uncle’s wife had passed the calabash his way.
He shook his head to clear it and slumped on a grass mat in the shade of a small tree near his rondavel.
It was late afternoon and, although the sun had not yet set, the daylight seemed dim. From a copse of trees next to the stream he heard a piet-my-vrou call, “Phezu komkhono, it’s time to hoe your land.” He lifted his head and gave a half smile. His mother had loved that call. “Early summer and my hoeing must get done. I must get the mealie seeds into the ground,” she would say. This summer the rains had come but he had no mealie seeds to plant.
But from the hilltop now there seemed to come another call.
“Sipho! Woza! Come! Sipho!”
And “Woza … Sipho … Sipho … ” echoing off the opposite hills.
3
A photograph of a man with a little black moustache
Sipho saw a tall, broad-shouldered figure silhouetted against the sky.
The man seemed to survey the whole valley and then he waved at Sipho and, when Sipho did not get up, came striding down the hill towards him. He was dressed in
