Chasing the tails of my father’s cattle
Sindiwe Magona
The South African novelist, playwright, autobiographer, short story writer, poet and activist intellectual Sindiwe Magona is widely known; her most iconic text remains her first memoir, To my children’s children (first published 1990), which covers her idyllic rural village childhood, the family’s relocation to a windy Cape Town “township” (ghetto) and her struggles as a young mother of three. The text featured in this African Library issue has somehow not attracted much attention from this author’s many readers, although reviews were overwhelmingly positive. It is a text that relates, in my view, to that first memoir, almost as a balancing, alternative portrayal of communal life in the village; a harsher sense of its uglier aspects is in evidence from near the start of the narrative: not only does the author’s unblinking gaze depict the prevalence of malicious gossip as fuelled by envy of others’ prosperity, but it also depicts the suspicion that any unusual individual conduct is somehow both dangerous and a betrayal, all too likely somehow immoral at its root. The man-made god of “Tradition” (usually spelt with a capital T to indicate Magona’s critical stance on this dominant ethos), where any adaptation to social and circumstantial changes is considered anathema, may take a battering from the narrator’s evident disapproval of such unthinking rigidity, and it is shown to inflict harm and to place confining bars around many lives. Magona is hardly an uncritical modernist, but although she does have deep appreciation for the value of the long-enduring cultural practices and beliefs of the Xhosa, what she conveys (sometimes emphatically and sometimes more obliquely) in this text is a conviction that a culture needs both growth and pruning – as a living thing that should adapt to its surroundings. If tradition stalls and hardens into ideology, it stultifies rather than nurtures both communal and individual life.
Sindiwe Magona (Photo: Izak de Vries)
The two central characters of Chasing the tails of my father’s cattle (published 2015) are Jojo (full name Jongumzi Madala) and his only surviving child, Shumikazi (this name, bestowed on her by her mother, Miseka, on her deathbed – where she passed away mere hours after giving birth – shows that Shumi is their tenth child). Shumi has other names, inter alia Nokufa (a name alluding to the child’s association in her maternal grandmother’s eyes with her mother’s demise) and No-Orenji, the name her future in-laws later bestow on their new makoti with reference to her light brown complexion.
The many sad and terrible losses that precede Shumi’s birth colour her entire existence – a point very beautifully articulated by the narrative voice, which is deployed with particular dexterity and sensitivity throughout the novel, here commenting on Shumi’s state soon after she gives birth to her own first child, a daughter:
The young mother whose mother had died giving birth to her, a mother who had lost nine children before that, could not take the life that had come through her for granted. For her, that was impossible. She had grown up with a secret desolation, the source of which was to her unknown; it is not easy being the survivor of such sorrow. All the children her mother had lost were written in the anguished love her father had showered on her. Unvoiced, the grief was part of her life, a history written in her blood. This she knew without knowing that she knew. The DNA of sorrow comes through the look, the touch, the words and feelings human beings receive from others, consciously sometimes, unconsciously most of the time. (269–70)
If this suggests an underlying melancholy tingeing Shumi’s life, she is also a woman who manages to surmount the later wounding hurts of betrayal and further losses, a person who transmutes the poison of resentment and even righteous anger into maturity. Magona conveys this point in a short prologue in Shumi’s own voice, where she articulates what her own sufferings have taught her: “for the heart to sing, it must put away all that taints it: those punishments meted out by a life lived, the grievances, the indignities, in all their manifestations, that are our lot” (7). She gives thanks “to and for those [with] fierce love – stronger even after they shed flesh, slipped into spirit and joined the perpetual, steadfast realm of the Ancestors” (8). The novel is subtly permeated by this underlying spiritual consciousness, which deepens and broadens the narrative’s bearing.
The setting, for the most part, is Zenzele Village, and from the start the author indicates that locals’ close interest in one another’s doings is less of a caring and sharing and more of a prying, meddling kind. Chapter one is titled “Cluck!” which alludes not to the sound of farmyard chickens, but to the voices of those who gossip and snoop. This is how the chapter opens:
When Miseka began to show that beneath her voluminous cotton skirts and pinafores she was rising [ie pregnant], few among the inhabitants of Zenzele Village could stop their tongues from wagging. And that was a lot of wagging, for by the year 1939 Zenzele boasted a population of about a hundred families.
That’s a lot of people, a lot of tongues[.] All a-wagging, wagging, wagging. … That is not to say that Zenzele had no good hearts among its lot, but, as elsewhere, it also had its fair share of heartless souls. (9)
For these latter, their main concern is not a shared hope that this time, at last, Miseka and Jojo will have a child who will outlive them, but the inconvenience – based on the cynical expectation that the new baby, like its nine predecessors, will die in infancy or early childhood – that it is the ethical norm for all the other local parents to avoid naming any new children by a name that would remind the bereft couple of any of the children they’ve lost. This, despite the fact that Miseka “was kindness itself” (9) in her own behaviour and shows no trace of vanity, despite her resplendent beauty and many other gifts and talents – the recurrent tragedy of child losses should earn her nothing but empathy among her fellows. She is hurt by the malice: “her ears burned from the whispers, the wounding words” (11). Interestingly, Magona draws a telling contrast between the response of “the red women who don’t know anything about church” (21) and the conduct of the women with whom she shares membership of a churchwomen’s fellowship, when it becomes clear that, this time, the final months of pregnancy are handicapping the normally incessantly industrious Miseka. For the unconverted women decide spontaneously on a most generous, practical gesture in setting out very early one morning to gather and bring their pregnant fellow villager masses of firewood that will see her through the coming months before and after the birth, whereas the churchwomen self-righteously and unilaterally decide that they will hold their usual prayer meeting at Miseka’s home. This requires her to sacrifice three chickens and cook them for the large group of visitors, as well as bake many loaves of bread served with jam to the supposedly pious – but greedy – women, who bring her nothing but prayers and cause her further exhaustion.
Jojo returns from the Johannesburg mine where he works, in time for the birth, and is thus home to bring his mother-in-law what she requires as the confinement starts, and to fetch the midwife. But, after many hours of painful struggle, Miseka’s attendants realise that the stricken woman must be taken to hospital for help. In those days, in a rural village, this, of course, does not mean in an ambulance summoned by telephone, but in a jolting ox cart over potholed dirt roads. Jojo is called to his wife’s hospital bed, only to find her seemingly on the verge of death. Yet, as Jojo sits with the woman he loves above all else, a spasm shakes her previously inert body, and as Miseka utters one dreadful scream, she gives birth at last to a baby girl. Jojo shouts desperately for the nurses, who take the child to clean her up, then return her – their own eyes brimming with tears – to the mother they know to be dying. Shumikazi is the name Miseka has previously chosen for a girl. As Jojo puts their baby down on his wife’s breast, she summons her breath in one final, incredible effort, charging Jojo with the sacred duty of looking after her daughter. The scene of Jojo’s anguish, Miseka’s terrible death and Shumikazi’s birth is both harrowing and imbued with profound compassion – a timeless moment of ultimates in pain, love and loss, unblinkingly observed.
Miseka’s mother, Manala, a “red” woman (ie one who lives by a traditional ethos and has shunned conversion to Christianity, although her daughter did join the church), demands to take care of the motherless newborn. She lives with the wives of her two sons, both migrant mineworkers like Jojo. The two makotis are from the start envious of the special care Manala necessarily bestows on Shumi, as they fear she is more of a favourite grandchild than their own children. Also, in portraying the Manala household, Magona emphasises the malice directed at the out-of-the-ordinary and the gifted, for from the start, her circumstances mark Shumi as a special child. Their mother-in-law “brought her dead daughter’s daughter back with her, and the mouths of the two makotis welcomed the infant; no one heard what their hearts said” (53). The makotis are scandalised at the discovery that Manala’s breasts started lactating soon after she, in desperation to comfort the crying baby, allowed her to suck; now, she is suckling Shumi as a matter of course – though still fairly secretively. In the eyes of the makotis, the lactation “was no miracle but witchcraft” (55). Cluck, cluck, cluck again.
Shumi grows up as a happy, bubbly youngest child in the little community of the now six grandchildren and their friends who share chores and fun-filled forays, often to go and swim in the nearby river. They are about as naughty and wily as most normal children and quite tolerant, mostly, when Shumi can’t quite keep up, even carrying her on hips or backs for long stretches. But signs that the little mother-deprived child is in other ways specially favoured recur. She’s still tiny when she is visited by a revered ancestor, the totemic snake of the Ngwanya clan of the Mpondomise; its visit to this toddler is an immense honour. The news of this occurrence prompts Jojo, home on a visit during his annual break from the mine, to give a special feast to celebrate and give thanks for the ancestor’s visit to his daughter. The other adults raise a few eyebrows, but comply, but gossip again intensifies when the child, at the feast, appears to see someone unseen by all the guests and hosts; she suddenly, joyously and for the first time in her life says: “Mama! Mama! Mama!” and “they said, verily, this one is not alone. Akayedwa,” followed by the inevitable, “Cluck cluck cluck!” (72). Some time later, the grandchildren and their friends disobey their parents’ and grandparents’ strictest prohibition: not ever to swim in a very deep nearby dam, where children have previously drowned. And, even though Manala’s daughters-in-law and their children keep mum about the event, a neighbour’s visit shocks “a scream not unlike that announcing a death” (89) out of the older woman. For the neighbour has come to complain that their family, who in a way benefited by the tragedy, have as yet neither sent condolences nor offered compensation to the bereaved for their grievous loss. Bewildered, Manala then hears the story: Shumi (known in her grandmother’s household as Nokufa) got into difficulties in the deep water, and none of her cousins could get to her, so that a teenage girl (their neighbours’ daughter), who was doing washing in the dam, felt compelled to go to her rescue, but tragically, she herself drowned in the process. Numerous feelings plague Manala afterwards: horror at what might have befallen her youngest grandchild, the child’s father’s response, the anguish of the bereaved family, the dreadful matter of their family’s involvement in the loss and the fact that the awful news was not immediately reported to her as head of the household. “Why had these young women, wives of her sons, lied to her? Who or what were they protecting?” (92), she wonders. In the surrounding village, the gossip again intensifies: Nokufa [Shumi] survived, although her mother died; now, she is the survivor of a near drowning, though her rescuer died. What special protection is she getting? In the meantime, Jojo, in the mining hostel, is haunted by his memory of Shumi playing at feeding her dolls, where the littlest one had “food” only smeared around her mouth to create the impression of a child that had been fed. Is this how the makotis are treating his little girl?
Jojo’s fears are soon confirmed. On a day when their mother-in-law goes off to attend a nearby wedding, the more unpleasant of the makotis, without having asked Manala’s permission, decides to kill one of the household chickens in order to prepare a feast for them and their children. The meal cooked and the women sated, they call their own children to get their share – but give only a bit of fried dough to little Shumi, waiting hopefully for a piece of meat. Then Manala returns unexpectedly and immediately susses out the scene. Furious, she takes Shumi with her to the hut where the two of them sleep, and gives her some of the meat and the treats she has brought back from the wedding; the other grandchildren will get their share the next day, she decides. But in the morning, it is discovered that fate has taken a hand, most dreadfully exposing the exclusion of Shumi, for the children of the two daughters-in-law – the three younger ones who were back from school in time to have shared in the feast of fried chicken – have all died! The terrible news pushes Jojo – already working reduced, six-month stints at the time so as to live at least half the year with his daughter – to leave mining work altogether. He is an excellent farmer whose livestock and vegetable crops, sold for good profits, will allow him to cover hut and poll taxes and live comfortably with Shumi, able to take care of her fully all year round. He can no longer stand worrying about his child’s well-being from afar. This is how Jojo experiences his very last return journey by train from the Witwatersrand mines:
As much as the goods train chugged along with amazing swiftness, Jojo’s heart flew even faster. … And as time passed and the terrain changed, the red earth of the Highveld making way for the green hills and valleys of the Transkei, the smell of familiar vegetation weakened his knees with anticipation, his heart filling with a quickened gladness. In his mind’s eye, he could already see his destination and he urged the train, puffing and huffing, to go even faster. This one single goal, seeing his daughter, immunised him against the current inconvenience, an inconvenience he expected and which was, at any rate, not unlike his living conditions in the mine compounds, the single-sex hovels in which mine bosses corralled them. The cattle they left in the village during the migration to the mines had more room in their kraals. And yet that first night on the train, Jojo slept as he had not slept for a long, long time.
The next morning, he woke up with a feeling of sheer release in his heart, his mind. He was not going back. He was not going back. (112)
Jojo does feel a twinge of sadness at saying farewell to Nande, the man who has been his dear friend at the mine for many years, as he’s unlikely to see much of him in years to come, but the prospect of a joyous reunion and from now on sharing his life year-round with Shumikazi overrides everything.
She was taller than he expected or remembered, prettier too, which he did expect. As the girl made her way toward the two men [her father and the headmaster], her eyes widened but she stifled the scream that threatened to spill out her gut. … Such things were not done in school. Such things were for home and Tata. (117)
The headmaster kindly allows Shumi (who is an excellent student) to leave school early, telling her: “Go and help him make tea. You know the old women will come for their sugar” (118), for in the village, every returning migrant worker gets visited by the elderly residents, who expect to get their own little gifts, particularly the sweets they love to suck and cannot usually afford to buy. Jojo and Shumi soon settle into their shared life. She continues her schooling, but now goes there from her own family home. There is a family gathering of the Tolo men (Jojo and his two older brothers, Welile the eldest and Mawethu the middle one] at Jojo’s home. The brothers urge their younger brother to remarry, but Jojo is not interested, informing them instead of his plans to send his “brilliant” Shumi to a good but expensive high school as a boarder, later on. The brothers are (predictably, given their “traditional” sexism and conservatism) scandalised at his plan: “You want to spend your money to send a child to more schools?” Mawethu and Welile, “who had remained silent for most of this conversation, asked, ‘Why do you want to educate a girl child?’” (121). The brothers reason that the money spent on further education for a girl “goes to waste”, as she is going to marry into another family and will not enter a profession or earn to pay back or take care of her parent in old age. Jojo is, of course, unbudging in his resolve, but moves to another issue concerning the Tolo family: Funiwe (their only sister) is in need of rescue from her horrifically abusive husband. But now, although the older brothers previously acknowledged that this was something they needed to do, they are (in Jojo’s more conscientious eyes, surprisingly) uninterested in pursuing this. The narrator explains:
It was common knowledge that such women [ie those who return to their parental families to escape a failed marriage] tended to visit strife upon their sisters-in-law, the women married to their brothers. In turn those women, priding themselves on enduring the inevitable hardship of wifehood, felt put upon by the returnee, oppressed by the added burden just such a returnee was intent on escaping. What defeats one woman and forces her back to her girlhood home adds to the load of her sisters-in-law. (122)
So, one infers that the two older brothers’ desire – probably lukewarm anyway – to save their sister from harm has been defeated by their wives’ demurral at taking in Funiwe and potentially also her two younger children; the older two (sons) are already working in the mines. But Jojo is plagued by a caring sense of responsibility towards their sister, and this feeling does not abate after his brothers’ return to their mine work, leaving much of the care for their own homes in his hands. Yet, in terms of his opinion that they need to intervene (as all three had previously agreed) in their sister’s plight, they had merely murmured vaguely that they’d do something if they received word that her marital situation had worsened. He is also peeved by their disapproval of his determination to give Shumi the opportunity for further education, so Jojo feels increasingly resentful of the stultifying weight of tradition. He is also aware that the mine dust has damaged his lungs and that he is unlikely to survive to old age, which would leave his daughter singly exposed to the local prejudices and narrowness of vision regarding girls and women, despite the nominal guardianship (of her) of his older brothers, should he predecease them. Shumi, too, has noticed his persistent, dry cough and is seriously concerned for his health, despite her father’s reassurances. Jojo softens the blow and loss (to his mother-in-law) of his bringing his daughter back to live permanently with him, by giving Manala a beautiful heifer from his herd and profusely thanking her. Of course, Manala has had her own fears that her makotis might neglect and even grievously harm Shumi, so her sorrow is tinged with relief from this particular anxiety. And she knows that Shumi (and Jojo) will visit her regularly. The gossipy and envious aunts are, of course, another matter; theirs is more of a “good riddance” attitude.
A substantial section of the narrative is devoted to the matter of Jojo’s action taken – in the form of a court case before the local chief – to bring his sister and eventually perhaps both of her younger children out of her husband’s reach to live with Shumi and himself. He does this after getting word that a man from his sister’s area has brought news that Funiwe has had to be hospitalised: “He said her husband beat her so much last night [that] the whole village went to stop him” (139). When Jojo goes to see her, he finds her so grievously hurt that her ears are the only recognisable, unhurt part of her that he can see. Jojo’s Tolo kinsman, Mandla, offers to assist him in strategising how to present the case for Funiwe to leave her husband, as it is known that the chief’s court is always very reluctant to legitimise complete dissolution of a union. At the court, Jojo argues that a wife suffering sustained violent abuse from her husband should be allowed to return to her childhood home. Jojo’s (or the Tolo clan’s) case is strengthened by the fact that Solomzi (the wife-beater) has failed to show up at the trial to defend himself, behaviour considered shockingly disrespectful to the court. Thus the sentence decided upon fines him heavily and grants the Tolos permission to take Funiwe to their home, along with her two younger children. Word is sent to the children, but they do not come to join their mother, who is grieved and worried by this. Then her husband shows up the next morning, unannounced and accompanied by three other men of his clan. The senior delegate informs an irate Jojo that they have come to get Funiwe back. Jojo is outraged, but the ensuing argument reveals the crucial fact that the other men are unaware that Solomzi insulted the court by absenteeism when Jojo brought the case for severance. Jojo is relieved when his sister assures him that she has not relented and has no intention of ever returning to Solomzi, but Solomzi then brings a case to the chief’s court to sue for his wife’s return. Shumi has been taking tender care of her aunt, whom she addresses and refers to as Sister of Father, nursing her to aid her agonisingly slow recovery. Funiwe is still far from well, but out of the blue, Shumi makes the unprecedented (in this family and community) suggestion that her aunt go along to be a witness and participant in the pending court case. This she is prepared to do. Solomzi presents a plausible case to the court, which is in any case heavily conservative and biased in the “traditionally” sexist way, but when Funiwe implores the court to observe her still terribly hurt, marked and damaged body, this has a most powerful effect. Even though the court disappointingly still decides that she should return to her husband, once fully recovered, she shouts defiantly that she will never do so. At least the court decides that the two younger children can join their mother at their uncle’s place (the slightly older, teenage boy nevertheless has to continue herding livestock for his father) and sleep there. Solomzi stages a dramatic collapse – but he will in due course take another wife, and then the court will permit divorce.
Then, another big event shakes Zenzele and many other nearby Transkei villages to the core:
Reports started to arrive, the physical evidence to follow. As is usual with verbal reports, these varied tremendously. Dozens of men had died, some said; hundreds, others stated. Within days, bodies rained on the villages via the town’s mortuary. Sleighs, wagons, trucks and police vans became a common and unwelcome sight, delivering still, sail-wrapped figures, some already boxed in hastily crafted coffins, too maimed and mangled to view – an abomination, putting into the soil a body no one had verified, seen and said, “It is him.”
Those who could read rushed to buy the newspapers. They wanted precise details of what the radio kept calling “The worst mine disaster South Africa has ever experienced.” However, although the papers carried a lot of details about the sad event, these served them not at all. The names of the dead were only those of white men. Black men were unnamed, only announced in mine-serving categories thus: Venda 200, Swazi 100, Hlubi 330, Shangaan 100, Malawi 45, Sotho 173, Xhosa 108, Pondo 250, Tswana 120. To the families in the Transkei, “Xhosa” or “Pondo” could be son, brother, husband, father or neighbour. How to know was the problem, the mind-numbing terror. The lucky, it was rumoured, lay groaning in distant hospitals. Months and later they would return much changed – that change not good to them or to their families; to all intents and purposes, lost souls. (201)
At last, Jojo learns that his brothers are safe, but his dear friend, Nande, has died in the disaster. To Jojo, this is a terrible reminder of mortality and of the toll mine work takes on male lives. He sees a doctor, who confirms what he suspects: he has phthisis – the terrible, wasting and fatal disease caused by years spent inhaling mine dust. His lungs are now badly damaged and, while he does not fear death for himself, he is terrified at the thought of what effect his own death will have on the quality of Shumi’s life in a society that devalues females, and with her having two guardians (her paternal uncles) without approval or sympathy for her educational aspirations. Jojo hence takes an unprecedented decision and – in his conservative, tradition-bound society – absolutely shocking step: that of making Shumikazi his sole heir. Since his farming ventures have prospered far beyond expectations, Jojo is now an extremely wealthy man, and Shumi will become an extraordinarily rich heiress. Of course, the village gossip levels soar astronomically, even though Jojo has kept his act, officially validated by the regional magistrate, as secret as possible. What he has not foreseen is the extent of resentment within his own closest family, and the danger Shumi now faces from another quarter. The girl has had her big day, the intonjana, which marks her as of mature and marriageable age. However, Shumikazi now represents a valuable prize for less scrupulous local young men; as she herself puts it: “a man might thwala her simply because he coveted the cattle she possessed” (217). To thwala a woman means to kidnap her into marriage; once so married, the union stands. One evening, when Shumi and a group of age-mates set out to gather wild spinach (imifino), Shumi’s mother’s spirit yet again exhibits her guarding, sheltering presence to her daughter, conveying a warning to Shumi that she should turn back and not proceed further up the mountainside with her friends. Sure enough, one of them gets grabbed by some unknown men, and Shumi’s friends rush screaming down the mountainside. Again, there is gossip about the strangely “protected” girl. Shumi is not opposed to the idea of getting married, but is nevertheless determined to study further. And she does so well in her examinations that she earns a valuable scholarship to the best available boarding school. Before one of her home holidays, Miseka’s spiritual guardianship manifests itself in a vision that comes to Shumi of a good-looking young man along with (decked out as bride in her wedding gown by his side) Miseka herself!
The vision is confirmed before too long. Two very respectable, well-dressed men arrive at Jojo’s homestead on horseback. They tell him that they are of the Rhadebe clan; they represent a family with the surname Mthi who have “a young man, Sandile, five years a man [ie he was initiated into manhood five years ago], now looking for a wife” (240). Jojo tells the men that his daughter still attends school, but that in any case, a matter like his daughter’s marriage requires consultation with all the Tolo brothers and other relatives; he asks the men from the distant village to return a week later so that the representatives of the two clans can talk. While Jojo’s older brothers demur, making the point that all the money Jojo spent on Shumi’s education will “go to waste” if she marries now, Funiwe intervenes: “while you [men] dither and piss on sunbaked boulders out on the veld, … that young man may just up and thwala Shumikazi” (241) – a thought horrifying to Jojo. He suggests that the other family could be asked to “wait for” (242) Shumi while she completes her education. In this way, she will be ensured of a secure, respectable home awaiting her when she decides she is ready for marriage, for, as he also now informs them, he knows he does not have very much longer to live. The family members are shocked and sorrowful; they have noticed, but repressed awareness of, Jojo’s deteriorating health. With consideration for their ailing brother, the Tolo consensus at the meeting is acceptance of the proposal, “subject to Shumikazi and the young man agreeing to a somewhat long engagement” (243). A special request comes from the visiting Ncembu men: although a prospective bridegroom may not set foot on the homestead of his intended until the lobola cattle (as many as 20 in this case) have been brought over, they ask that the two young people be at least allowed to set eyes on one another. After initial demurral from Welile as the head of the Tolo family, this wish is granted. Sandile is waiting in the bushes with two other young men when a shy Shumikazi is brought down to meet him by four of her cousins. When she, having ever so slowly raised her eyes to his, at last takes in his full appearance, he is unmistakably the same young man that she saw in her vision beside her late mother. They exchange courteous greetings and speak together privately for a short while. The two are considered betrothed when Shumi returns to her school. Now, both her and Jojo’s hearts are at rest that her future is secure, the 20 cows having been driven over as undeniable pledge of a future union between the two families. The leave-taking between father and daughter is always a bit sad, but this time it is different:
Jojo steeled himself. He would not cry. He would not send his child away in tears. This was a picture she would take with her … a picture that would stay with her for … for a long, long time. … He smiled. Sadness sat in his eyes, but still he smiled. He’d always been a little sad whenever he saw her off, said goodbye to her. He was sad now. But this was a different kind of sad. A heaviness of heart accompanied it. (248, original as well as added ellipses)
Both know what is unspeakable. Jojo, now frail, on a sudden impulse runs towards Shumi to hug her once more, whispering to her of his deep love for her, as she says the same. Then, they part. A mere four months later, Shumi is sent for by the family, as her dying father has asked for her. She arrives at her home to find Jojo “barely alive”, though “his eyes smiled at seeing her” as she wordlessly holds his hand (250). Sandile’s family come over to attend all the funeral ceremonies and to support their future daughter-in-law. It is only now that they learn that Jojo had given Shumi all his wealth; this had played no part in their proposal of marriage.
Shumi returns to her school, but is trapped in a desolate state of mourning. Worried about her, the Mother Superior summons her, reminding and reassuring Shumi of God’s undying, steadfast love for her. But even as she speaks, Shumi “sees” the elderly woman slowly transfiguring into the mother she had never seen alive. Miseka speaks in a poem, telling her daughter that she is never alone, that they will meet one day, and that the bleak and terrible times in her life will strengthen her and will always be succeeded by renewed hope and peace. Heartened by her vision of a caring mother, Shumi writes and passes her form II exams. But when the time comes for her to return to complete the final year of her junior certificate and money is needed to fund the costs of transport, pocket money, clothing and so on (that are not covered by her bursary), both her uncles demur, claiming they cannot afford this. Her father’s farm manager, now a married man but loyal to Jojo’s memory and to Shumi, offers to help, but is refused on the grounds that he is not “family”. Desperate, Shumi suggests that a couple of beasts from her inheritance be sold, but the necessary permission is refused. Nor will the family permit her marriage to be brought forward until the full period of mourning is over (in the middle of the year). Funiwe is worried that Shumi may be a “sitting duck” for any greedy young man who may want to thwala her. Sandile, fortunately, is not interested in doing so; he respects Shumi’s preference (and his own) for a respectable church wedding.
But the issue of her enormous wealth increasingly troubles Shumi. In thinking this over, intending to handle matters scrupulously and judiciously, she makes the greatest mistake of her life, entirely underestimating the lack of honour and family loyalty and, simply, the greed of her elder uncle.
Shumikazi turned the problem over in her head and eventually decided that the best way – indeed, the only way to protect her father’s cattle – would be to hand them over to his brother. That way, her inheritance remained in her parental home, safe, beyond the reach of strangers [which her in-laws still are to her at this stage]. “Blood can’t be washed or wished away,” she reasoned, “whereas love can be like a cigarette and diminish with usage. Indeed, it can die.” If, for whatever reason, her marriage crumbled, in the eyes of the law, the cattle would otherwise be [her husband’s] and she would be stripped of all her father’s bequest, whereas Uncle Welile or his sons would always be there for her, look after her should she, for one or another reason, become a returnee from wifehood. That was their role, the role of the men in the family since it was they who received her lobola and, in this case, more – her inheritance. They were blood, her blood. (257)
Shumi’s favourite aunt, her younger uncle’s wife, has her misgivings but knows she may not express them when Shumi informs her of the plan, but Mawethu, the middle Tolo brother, is furious. Tradition, however, dictates that the eldest brother, as head of the family, should be the one to take possession of its holdings. Yet, Mawethu also “knew Welile perhaps better than anyone else. He was weak, selfish and lazy” (258). Shumi, unaware of the man’s perfidious tendencies, formally entrusts the cattle to him at a family ceremony, where Welile “sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the possibilities suddenly thrust upon him” (259). What most reassures Shumi is that, on the day that she entrusts the cattle to her elder uncle, Sandile says to her, “Your father saw that you had me and he could go and join his heart, your mother. I will be to you as he was – good and respectful. Love you as myself” (262).
The first manifestation of Welile’s betrayal is in the blatant disparity between the value of the gifts bestowed upon Sandile’s family members in a pre-marital family bonding ceremony, and those that he organises for the prospective in-laws of his own daughter. The shabbiness of the goods set aside for Sandile’s family deeply shames Shumi, and now she feels mortified that she, so recently the owner of a vast herd of cattle, will bring so little with her upon joining the Rhadebe clan. Even the household goods that are bought for her new marital home are few and of inferior quality, in sharp contrast with the lavish amount of expensive things Welile funds for his daughter. Shumi’s aunt, Nosapho, notices her grief as Shumi, early in the morning of the day she is to be wed, kneels and sobs heartbreakingly at Jojo’s grave. Nosapho, too, had deeply loved Jojo; he had been both her brother-in-law and (secretly, according to age-old custom) the brother who had been asked to and had fathered her children – her husband, Mawethu, having become impotent after a botched circumcision during his initiation. She comes to the aid of the distressed bride and rushes to acquire better quality household goods and gifts – “a truckload of goods” (266) – for her. Still, the marital feast funded for Shumi is notably meagre – but her young husband knows the right words to comfort her when she breaks down in tears at the news of the sumptuous feast that Welile has provided for his own daughter.
Shumikazi’s normally blithe but dignified and affectionate nature soon wins her the love of her parents-in-law. One morning, a week before her husband’s return to his mine work, she does not bring them their breakfast, as they have become used to, but is seen hard at work with Sandile in their nearby yard, digging out and preparing the construction of a proper pit toilet at a suitable distance from the house. But her husband’s tenderness towards her and his considerate nature have also established a deep and tender marital bond between them.
So it was that when Sandile left she was left with bittersweet memories of his gentleness and infinite patience, of how he had helped her leap across the steep gulf from girl to woman … his great and tender strength provoking in her a torrent in which she drowned and, drowning, carried her along to blissful depths. … [N]ine months to the day of the wedding, almost, No-Orenji [her name in her marital context] was delivered of a daughter. The grandparents named the girl Sithemba, for they hoped they would still be blessed with a grandson. (268)
Back home, Welile (emboldened by his vast new wealth) has wasted no time in starting an ugly career of extramarital affairs, as he is easily able to compensate the women’s irate families for the babies born out of wedlock that have put paid to the women’s marital prospects. Shumi and Sandile have a son, Luvuyo, two years after Sithemba’s birth, and three years later another boy, named Lufefe – the children (Sandile’s parents’ first grandchildren) are adored by Sandile’s parents.
No-Orenji’s married life is fulfilled and happy, but like most wives of her place and time, she dreads the long absences of a migrant labourer husband, and “in her heart” she “lamented”, singing the old song of “the gold widows of Zenzele” (271). Her mother’s dress – a kind of token of her presence in Shumi’s life – hangs always on the wall, and one day, it appears to shed tears. The following chapter is titled, “The widow’s robes” (275). Shockingly, no one from Shumi’s birth family except a cousin with his wife and children turn up at Sandile’s funeral. Sibuka, Jojo’s loyal former farm manager, arrives with a generous contribution of two sheep for the funeral ceremony.
Subsequent to Sandile’s death, Shumi is soon plagued by importunate suitors, including her late husband’s younger brothers. This becomes less and less bearable to the grieving woman, who has no desire or need to replace him. Even her parents-in-law, loath to lose her to another family, start pressurising her to wed their youngest son, Sondlo. Shumi asks her in-laws to release her so that she can return to her father’s homestead, and, reluctantly, her father-in-law permits the separation – though not before the end of the full period of mourning for Sandile. She travels to Mthatha to buy clothes to replace the black garments of mourning and encounters the shopkeeper, a friendly white man who bought from her father and respected him. He is surprised that she did not complete her schooling and reveals that the nuns at her school had, after her father’s demise, sent a telegram that made the offer of covering all her schooling costs. The telegram had been handed to Welile, but he had again betrayed his promises to look after Shumi when her father died by keeping this news from her. The shock finally hits her: “I was the one who erred” (285). Having insufficiently trusted Jojo’s judgement of leaving his cattle to her rather than to Welile, she now has no one else to blame.
Leaving her children temporarily in the care of her in-laws, who undertake to look after her and Sandile’s cattle for their three grandchildren, Shumi goes back to her family home, only to find the place in ruins. It has been in the care of Mvume, Welile’s second son, and his wife and family. Still undeterred, Shumi starts setting all to rights. Sibuka and his wife provide tireless help and “starting” cattle, though Shumi still hopes to get at least some of her father’s beasts or their offspring back from Welile – given her plight. To no avail does she eloquently present her case at a family meeting; in terms of the rules of tradition, she cannot enforce her moral claim. Still, Shumi prospers: her crops flourish and her small herd soon grows; her children join her, and all three of them end up as university graduates. She dips her cattle, and they survive the devastating rinderpest epidemic that, in poetic justice, wipes out Welile’s already dwindling herds.
Evidently, Chasing the tails of my father’s cattle is no comforting fable of ubuntu-governed family and community life. Yet, despite the many ugly manifestations of heartlessness and betrayals of duty and familial sharing and caring, Zenzele and other villages do have their fair share of “good hearts” (9), as the narrator early on conceded. Many who remember Jojo’s many acts of kindness and generous sharing of farming advice, as well as Miseka’s soft heart and Shumi’s own good conduct, do come to her aid. Magona may refuse to sentimentalise rural black South African community life, but her portrayal is rich, varied and compelling, and the main characters in the narrative are unforgettably depicted in both their deep sorrows and their times of profound love and joy. This dense novel confers further weight to this author’s contribution to South African literature. It is commendable that, while it notes the terrible cost of the migrant labour system, its central interest is in rural relations and lives.