-Produced as part of M.Thesis, There’s Another Story Here. Published in the Chimurenga Chronic, 2019
What is there to say about this place?
Four times, maybe five, I nearly died and this is how I have come to measure my life here. The first time. The door swinging open. (The afternoons still hot and musty like breath. The evenings, a sharp, chilly inhale). The second time and the screams of metal against metal. The third time. The fourth. The fifth.
There were other things but they make for less exciting stories. What is a depression of donkeys bringing traffic to a halt to a battered, home-made blade; ripped, strips of fabric wrapped around the one end to form a handle. Not a topless man, blood streaming from a cut above his eyes, caught by the groin of his pants on the sharpened spike of a wrought iron gate. As he frees himself, the spike forces itself further into the skin of his thigh and he screams “It’s not me. It’s not me. I was sent here.”
After the fourth time my brother comes over because of the first man and the second man and the third. He is here because men with knives insist on letting themselves into my home. To create the kind of protective spell that only blood kin can create. To split open his veins in order to seal mine. I try to tell him that’s its not me, it’s this place. It’s a festering wound and now I am infected.
Two blocks from my house is a building in a shameful shade of blue, some kind of annex or steeple drilling up through the head of it. I take my brother there, better view of the place. On the inside a staircase snakes through the centre, spiralling over itself like a dizzying top, winding one landing on top of the next like twisting damaged vertebrae. We heave ourselves through its frayed nerves endings, spinning up, close to each other, the stairs so narrow, so steep that there is no room to stop. The guide, an older man of serious faces and jangling keys leads us out onto the roof, closing the door behind him. He sifts through his tambourine of keys, finds one, and opens the door to the steeple. The room drowns in light for a little. Tiny dust particles pirouette, suspended in air, trapped here. We step in, my brother and I. The man rustles, clashes and clangs, swings a peeling door closed. It is the dark of ancient winters. He clears his throat. He begins; “There are seven of these Victorian Camera Obscura’s in the world.” In his one hand he holds a thin wooden rod. He gestures with this wand, pointing above us, in front, behind him to the painted wooden wall. “What is happening here, right on top of our roof here, we’ve got a turret.” The wand pushes up. “The turret is having a mirror inside. The mirror is taking a picture, putting it through to a double lens convex and throwing it here, on top of this table, on this bowl.” He taps in front of him three times in the dark. There is a raised, circular platform in the centre of the room. An altar. On it, a white Perspex bowl. We have come to see the oracle. To diagnose the conditions of our souls. “This Camera Obscura has a 180-360 degree view of Grahamstown. This house, the man who used to live here, he was a watch maker, a jeweler, an astronomer.” The man moves in dark, the air makes room for him. He shuts a door somewhere, pulls on a string and a trap door on the celling of the building swings open. He drags on a green and white string, a pulley of sorts and there in the white hollow of the bowl, Grahamstown bent around its curves, sunken in the middle, parts of the image climbing up the rim to reach us. He points things out. An Afrikaans school built in 1954. A library. A red roof of some civic building. “We have three towers here, the clock tower, a flag pole, and the Camera Obscura. That is where we are.” To follow the images, we move around the altar, séance. He points out the Cathcart Arms Hotel (Known as eKatini to the savvy) the oldest in this town, built in 1845. “On the right here, this is the start of the township called Fingo village. This here,” he moves the stick, tapping it on the bowl, “is the township called eGazini. EGazini meaning bloodshed. This is where the white people fought amaXhosa in 1819. After the British defeated amaXhosa, Queen Victoria donated the land to Mfengu people. This is why they call it Fingo Village.” He pulls the string again. A new image materialises and we step to the right to face it. “There is a road here. Reverend Road. There is a history about this road. I’ll take you back up to 1976. Up to 1980. During the uprisings. This road, it was the only road to Port Elisabeth via Grahamstown to East London. No other way. If you were a white person in this time, you can’t go on this road otherwise you will get a nice gift of a crown to your head in the form of a red brick, a nice necklace of burning tire and delicious juice of petrol.” In the dark I cannot make out his features. The man sounds proud. He is smiling. He is speaking. “And here at the top, we have Makana Hill. Makana he was a leader. A king. A chief, a prophet of AmaXhosa. Before that battle of 1819, he came and stand on top of the hill with his 10 000 warriors to fight 4000 British soldiers. 4000 British soldiers all armed with guns. Makana and his 10000 men with spears and shields. And Makana said these words, when the battle was about to start ‘their bullets will turn to water.’ But the bullets stayed bullets and more than 4000 warriors died.” We continue to walk a circle around the altar, our bodies tracing its circumference. We walk, he points. A bloodshed here. A church. A bloodshed there. A church. The british. The boers. The Blacks. A church. A bloodshed there. A bloodshed here. Another church.
Here in my body, the first man. The second. The third. A church. A bloodshed. The British. The Boers.