Endings and beginnings
Michael Bartlet considers a novel by South African author Redi Tlhabi
While visiting Cape Town recently, I was shaken by an inequality that made it hard to relax. Townships with savage poverty exist as ghettos a few miles away from the most expensive real estate in Africa. In the modest flat where we stayed there were three lines of security. A live electric wire ran along the top of the perimeter fence, reinforced with razor wire. A trip wire connected us to an armed response unit. A conventional burglar alarm activated by movement in the room served as a back-up. In Cape Town this is not unusual.
Inequality is rife and violence rampant. Seventeen years after the end of apartheid, according to the 2011 census, the annual earnings of blacks are 60,613 rand ($6,987), one sixth of that for whites. The murder rate is among the highest in the world. The current recorded level of murders is fifty per day. Rape is commonplace. In 1998 one in three of the 4,000 women questioned by the Community of Information, Empowerment and Transparency said they had been raped in the past year. More than twenty-five per cent of a sample of 1,738 South African men from the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape Provinces reported raping someone according to a policy brief issued by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The loss of forty-five lives in industrial conflict at the Marikana platinum mine last August revealed a simmering injustice where workers in a profitable industry lack basic sanitation, fresh water and electricity.
Yet alongside this violence and inequality, there is an inspiring optimism. South Africa has been a model to the world in its transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy. An ideology that drew on the racial doctrines of Nazism was dismantled without civil war in a transition to a society with constitutionally guaranteed human rights. I found myself struggling to piece all these things together, as if looking through a pair of glasses fitted to the wrong prescription, until I was given a remarkable novel. Endings and Beginnings is written by the radio presenter Redi Tlhabi. Her warm-hearted imagination illuminates these contradictions far more incisively than any sociological research.
Her book is really two stories. It offers a compelling insight into the tragedy of Soweto under siege from apartheid and crime. The first is the story of an eleven-year-old orphan whose father had been stabbed to death and his eye gouged out. It is an autobiographical account of a vulnerable and sensitive teenager’s emotional awakening in response to a charming, but violent drifter in Soweto. Mabegzo – his street name – is feared and hated but to the narrator he is kind, thoughtful and sensitive, a protector. He could ‘switch on the lights of [her] heart with a smile and a wink’. In the slums, where rape is commonplace and murder rife, he becomes her protector. This first part of the story culminates with Mabegzo being gunned down on the corner of a street, by his friends, while coming to meet the narrator.
In the second part, the narrator, now a journalist, returns to her roots, twenty years later, to find out the facts of her father’s death and to understand the truth of the life of the charismatic Mabegzo whom she now knows was both a rapist and a murderer. The narrator forms a bond with Inmelda, Mabegzo’s mother. Inmelda was gang raped as a teenager, exiled to Lesotho and separated from her son by the boy’s grandmother out of her family’s sense of shame.
Tlhabi’s novel is compassionate and empathic – a story of healing. The author writes of ‘her fervent belief that social conditions create the monsters who terrorise our lives and make us prisoners in our own country’. In facing her own past the narrator is given the ‘gift of introspection and maturity’ that enable her to live again. Inmelda is offered the possibility of atonement in being reconciled with her grandchild. Finally, Mabegzo is recognised as neither monster nor hero, ‘my charmer, my protector, my confidante, my obsession but Mabegzo, the murderer, the rapist, the gouger of dead man’s eyes.’ The novel offers ‘a reflection of the contradictions of his being’. It does not pull any punches. The descriptions are graphic. It is both a novel of hope and a wider metaphor for South Africa.
Reconciliation is not inevitable. It is a hard and painful process that involves un-bandaging wounds and listening to each other. It happens in community. Thlabi illustrates the possibility of new beginnings in the bloodiness of everyday life. But without a transfer of power, ‘reconciliation’ risks becoming a hollow slogan and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a morality play that fails to address the scalding poverty of many of those working, or unemployed, in South Africa. The noble vision of multi-racial equality remains to be fulfilled. In a country of such enormous natural wealth why do so many still lack the basic necessities of life?
