[2017] What We Lose Read online

  This was the last time that Mr Sono saw his son.

  Ms Madikizela-Mandela has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the abductions, assaults and killing of Lolo Sono or Sibuniso Tshabalala.

  In this regard I find myself dubious about the politics of women’s peace groups, for example, which celebrate maternality as the basis for engaging in antimilitarist work. I do not see the mother with her child as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-righteousness. I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.

  On 29 December 1989, four youths—Pelo Mekgwe, Thabiso Mono, Kenneth Kgase and Moeketsi Stompie Seipei—were abducted from the Methodist manse in Soweto and taken to the Mandela home in Diepkloof Extension. The youths were accused of engaging in sexual relations with the Reverend Paul Verryn, the priest who ran the manse, and Seipei was singled out and accused of being a police informer. All four youths were assaulted, Seipei severely.

  In early January, Seipei’s decomposing body was found in a river-bed on the outskirts of Soweto. His body and head were riddled with injuries and he had been stabbed in the neck three times.

  For two weeks in early January, senior religious and community leaders negotiated with Ms Madikizela-Mandela to secure the release of the other youths held at the house. Madikizela-Mandela denied that they were being held against their will and stated that she had rescued them from sexual abuse at the manse.

  When the youths were eventually released and the story spread to the media, Madikizela-Mandela issued several statements and conducted interviews in which she attacked the church for orchestrating a massive cover-up. The war of words continued into February. Following the identification of Stompie Seipei’s body, several members of the MUFC, including Mr Jerry Richardson, were arrested and charged with murder.

  Ms Madikizela-Mandela has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the killing of Stompie Seipei on 1 January 1989.

  The Commission received three versions of this killing. Jerry Richardson, who was convicted for the murder and applied for amnesty, claimed that he killed Seipei on Madikizela-Mandela’s instructions. Katiza Cebekhulu claimed that he witnessed Madikizela-Mandela stabbing Stompie Seipei, a version supported by John Morgan, who testified that he was instructed to dump Seipei’s body. The third version was presented in the form of an unsigned, typed section 29 detention statement from Mr Johannes ‘Themba’ Mabotha, a Vlakplaas askari who frequented the Mandela home, which states that he was present at a meeting when Richardson informed Madikizela-Mandela that he had killed Seipei. Although this statement claims that Madikizela-Mandela was shocked at what Richardson had told her, it goes on to allege that she was directly involved in an attempt to spread misinformation that Seipei was alive and had been seen in a refugee camp in Botswana. A further version, suggested by former Security Branch policeman Paul Erasmus, is that Richardson killed Seipei because he (Seipei) had found out that Richardson was an informer.

  The various versions, with the exception of that of Erasmus, all implicate Ms Madikizela-Mandela, either directly or indirectly, in Seipei’s murder or its attempted cover-up.

  On my last Christmas with my mother, we were in South Africa, where we ate dinner at my grandfather’s house in Johannesburg. We had slipped out of Philadelphia just before a snowstorm hit, while summer reigned in Joburg. I spent the morning doing laps in the pool at our vacation house and the evening in a Santa hat, eating beef tongue and fish biryani.

  We sat in my grandfather’s living room, scraping the last bits of trifle from our dessert plates. A soccer game played on the TV. My aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins were all there. Conversation turned to my grandmother, my mother’s mother and matriarch of the family. It had been some time since she died—I was still in junior high when she passed away—but our family dinners were still marked by her absence.

  “Aish,” my mother said into her trifle, “the worst times are when I wake up and I think, ‘I have to call Mama to say hello.’”

  I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart’s desires.

  Before everyone went home, the family gathered for a prayer of departure. My grandfather thanked God for all the family that had come from near and far. He asked God for our safe flight back home. And then he asked—his voice breaking—to heal my mother, and in response there were mumbled yeses, hallelujahs from around the room.

  We said our goodbyes and loaded into the car. It was dark by then. My father was driving, my mother in the passenger seat. I sat in the back, cradling a tinfoil-topped ceramic dish full of tepid curry. I held it on my lap, letting it warm the tops of my thighs. The weather was hot during the day, but cold as late autumn at night.

  We were driving on the N1 for less than ten minutes when we saw brake lights multiply in front of us. There was a traffic jam up ahead. Then there was the flashing red and yellow of emergency vehicles. An ambulance and police car were parked on the shoulder, outside the driver’s side of the car. An officer and two ambulance workers stood between the two emergency vehicles, their heads pointed at the ground before them.

  I knew what it was before I even saw anything. My family had told us of the daily accidents on that road, of the day laborers who crossed the many lanes to get from one side to the other and were often clipped by flying cars. I heard my mother’s gasp from the front seat, but it was more than that. There was the knowledge, heavy on my heart, that something was very wrong. As we got closer to the scene, I made out the dead body of a man on the ground before the workers. He was lying faceup, his torso minced horizontally into three pieces.

  “Must’ve been walking on the highway,” my father said, clucking solemnly.

  “Shame,” my mother whimpered in return.

  I couldn’t speak; I could only shudder. My stomach turned, but I could not look away. I craned my neck all the way around as we crawled past the scene, until I could no longer see the man through the back windshield. Traffic picked up and we turned off the highway, up the hill, and into the driveway of our vacation home. The man was still on my mind, but he was fading. I still felt a small tinge of horror, I felt a bit less safe. I felt sad for him, for any family he might have had. But there was not much time to think of him as we unloaded our dishes and bags and gifts from the car. I had to carry all my things, including the precarious curry dish, in one hand.

  My other arm I offered to my mother, and she leaned heavily on it up the stone walkway to our front door. She was shaky and tired from the long day. It took us many minutes, and many times I was afraid I would drop something or that she would fall, but eventually, we reached the front door, and we all went to sleep peacefully that night, grateful for the life that we still had.

  She’s gone.

  But she’s here, I can feel her. I can see her that day they told us that everything was going to be all right.

  But she’s not here.

  But I can feel her arms around me. It feels like the breeze coming off the river. It enwraps me with its warmth. It comforts me. It smells like her breath.

  But she’s long gone.

  But maybe I can be happy with something else. If I feel happy and shut my eyes, maybe it will be the same.

  But it will never be the same.

  PART THREE

  When Peter is gone, my body enters a period of slow motion from which I cannot emerge. Everything moves underwater. My body feels already extremely pregnant, as does my mind. There is little difference between week two and week eight.

  Our heroes tend to be orphans. Beowulf, Batman, even Harry Potter. There are plenty of plausible explanations. Perhaps they all began as spectacular individuals, and not having parents a
fforded them more room to define their identity in a spectacular way? Or does the loss of parents endow them with a drive to do greater things? Do they just have more to prove? Or do we simply view the loss of parents as the most tragic of situations, so that a person who overcomes such a circumstance is necessarily imbued with some aspect of heroism?

  Arguably South Africa’s greatest hero, Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography of feeling “cut adrift” after his father’s death. It was the experience that led him to leave his childhood home, thus signaling a literal and figurative departure from childhood:

  Late that night he called for Nodayimani, “Bring me my tobacco,” he told her. My mother and Nodayimani conferred and decided that it was unwise that he have tobacco in his current state. But he persisted in calling for it, and eventually Nodayimani filled his pipe, lit it, and then handed it to him. My father smoked and became calm. He continued smoking for perhaps an hour, and then, his pipe still lit, he died.

  I do not remember experiencing great grief so much as feeling cut adrift. Although my mother was the center of my existence, I defined myself through my father. My father’s passing changed my whole life in a way that I did not suspect at the time. After a brief period of mourning, my mother informed me that I would be leaving Qunu. I did not ask her why, or where I was going.

  I packed the few things that I possessed, and early one morning we set out on a journey westward to my new residence. I mourned less for my father than for the world I was leaving behind. Qunu was all that I knew, and I loved it in the unconditional way that a child loves his first home. Before we disappeared behind the hills, I turned and looked for what I imagined was the last time at my village. I could see the simple huts and the people going about their chores; the stream where I had splashed and played with the other boys; the maize fields and green pastures where the herds and flocks were lazily grazing. I imagined my friends out hunting for small birds, drinking the sweet milk from the cow’s udder, cavorting in the pond at the end of the stream. Above all else, my eyes rested on the three simple huts where I had enjoyed my mother’s love and protection. It was these three huts that I associated with all my happiness, with life itself, and I rued the fact that I had not kissed each of them before I left. I could not imagine that the future I was walking toward could compare in any way with the past that I was leaving behind.

  The cliché that is uttered by survivors of the dead, especially children who have lost beloved parents, is that the child or survivor wants to make them proud. I’m doing this for Dad, they will say and point to the sky, while ascending a mountain or giving a virtuoso performance to an adulatory crowd. And there is always the single tear, reminding us of both the pain and the glory of success, both perfectly present in that single, clean display of emotion. This is how it is supposed to work, to remind us that the universe is perfectly in balance, and those who suffer will be rewarded with triumph.

  This thought was foremost in my mind when watching Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in 2008. The Obama family—so sharply dressed in black and bright red, which contrasted with their glowing brown skin—looked literally new, with their fresh hairstyles and vibrant clothing. They were also something we Americans had never seen before. They—a young, handsome black family, installed as our nation’s figureheads, buoyed by the support of millions—were new to us, as a nation.

  Their four small figures cut against the expansive stage and American flags behind them as well as the huge park itself. The thousands of supporters below them were seen wildly celebrating as heard in their cheers and the flashbulbs that popped at us from the TV screen.

  From the negative space above and around the new first family, one could infer the presence of the departed, of all those who had made this day possible. I imagined Obama’s ancestors, and freedom fighters, civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, even Jesse Jackson—those whose names we knew through history—and Obama’s own father, a specter of fear and incomprehensibility for many.

  And then there is Ann Dunham, who planted so many seeds, but died before she could see any more than the faintest green hint of his promise. One imagines her looking on from whatever heaven she’s chosen, utterly surprised, satisfied beyond comprehension. This is the orphan’s ultimate fantasy.

  I think sometimes that had I known [my mother] would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book—less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

  This passage comes from the preface to the 2004 edition of Dreams from My Father, which contextualizes the book nine years after its original publication in 1995. Obama had secured a book deal following his history-making election as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. A few months after the book’s publication, Obama’s mother passed away from cancer. The year 1996 marked his official entrance into politics after he was elected to the Illinois State Senate.

  My leave from university meant that when I returned, the few friends I’d made were gone. Thankfully, that included Dean and his new girlfriend, who, I heard through the grapevine, had moved to a loft in Brooklyn and started a band together. I had taken classes at a college in Philadelphia to keep up, but still graduated a year late.

  I studied politics and philosophy, and graduated cum laude. Aminah, Frank, and my father showed up at my graduation. Aminah was her usual overbearing self, snapping countless photos and asking me to pose with her in front of ivy-covered buildings and rusting statues. My father was proud but distracted.

  In order to pay my bills, I had to dip into my inheritance account, and every time I withdrew, I said it would be my last, or that I would slow my spending, but gradually, the money was eaten away as if by the cancer that killed her. By graduation, half of my inheritance was gone. It devastated me to think that she worked so hard to save that money, and that I spent it so easily.

  The night of commencement, we had dinner at the Mediterranean restaurant at the bottom of College Hill. The place was filled with other cap-and-gown graduates clutching balloons and flowers. Aminah inspected them.

  “That girl is so beautiful,” she said of one student I’d seen around campus. “Could they be any louder?” she said of a group of boys. I could offer no comment on any of them—I knew not a one.

  I took a job in New York, at a government agency that dealt with AIDS research. I found an apartment in Harlem, in an old brownstone on the same block where James Baldwin once lived. My job paid for me to take classes toward a master’s in public health at Columbia University, so usually I was busy nights and weekends. My father and Aminah visited me from Philadelphia sometimes, and they took me for the only nice dinners I ate.

  Aminah moved back to Philadelphia after graduating from NYU. Frank found a job at UBS, and they bought a duplex apartment not far from Rittenhouse Square. Their wedding was on the grounds of the college in our hometown, where I was a reluctant maid of honor in an awkward one-sleeved dress.

  Frank’s brother walked me down the aisle. Aminah wore a figure-hugging sheath, and when I saw her in the dressing room all done up, I felt for the first time what breathtaking meant. I couldn’t help but get emotional, even though it—the white dress with the five-figure price tag—was not something I believed in. It was also something I knew I would never have, because the only person who would have forced such a ceremony on me was gone.

  After the ceremony, Frank’s brother hit on me relentlessly. Formerly the awkward geek, I had morphed into something he now found appealing. He whispered in my ear something so saccharine it made me blush, but I did it for the hell of it. Thirteen-year-old me was applauding from the bleachers. When nearly everyone had gone home, I fo
llowed him to his childhood bedroom, imagining that I was Aminah—sixteen, gorgeous, and a daring guest in that stately old home. The next morning, I watched Frank’s brother sleep for ten minutes. His hair was thinner, age rounding out his features—a shadow of his teenage self. I felt myself wanting more.

  I have yearned for certain sensations—the feeling of being able to contain someone’s hopes and fears in one touch. I have longed for it with Peter, although at other times with him I have felt it.

  Over the phone the next few weeks, Peter and I begin to think about how we will share our child. In my mind, I think that this is betting on a lot. It is so wishful of us to plan, that first this child will be born, that I won’t die in labor or kill it by dropping it on its head. There are endless ways this child can die, and they are all the result of my possible mistakes.

  I somehow manage to go to work, to come home at night and fix my dinner, and, regardless of how little I’ve slept, wake myself the next morning, dress, and get to work on time. In the beginning, I tell Aminah nothing, but then, when we are speaking on the phone one day, she asks why I haven’t said Peter’s name in weeks. I tell her about his last weekend in Brooklyn, how cold and distant he suddenly became, how he couldn’t wait to get on that plane. It doesn’t make sense to her, how the change could have happened so suddenly—from being in love to no longer speaking. I tell her that he is different, that he cares for me, that he won’t be one of those who just disappears. I wield excuse after excuse and none of them work. I have to admit to her the truth—about the baby still growing inside me that is Peter’s.