https://www.nb.co.za/en/view-book/?id=9780795710827
The resurrection
Sihle Qwabe
NB Publishers
ISBN: 9780795710827
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All the same, I commend the book for delineating well the pathological symptoms of worshiping Mammon, even if it doesn’t provide pressure valves to let off the steam. We may, as I indicated, argue that the artist’s duty is only to mirror our society back on itself. Alas, that attitude is easier said until, like me, you become a parent. Then you worry about the tremendous influence art has in depicting to overly impressionable youth misdirected shortcuts of success.
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After the tragic death of his infamous father (Bantu “DaDon”), the owner of The Zulu Club, at the hands of the underworld mafia, his son, Victor Zulu, is summoned by his mother (Charity) to take over the family business. Knowing that it was the club which was the undoing of both his brother and his father, Victor has to find the courage to “resurrect” it somehow. He knows that the chances of his survival are slim if he gets involved in the underworld business. What choices does he have? Fate has put him in the ring with drug pushers, corrupt moneymongers and other such bullies. He has to honour his mother’s desperate appeals to save the family name:
My Father and brother died in this club, Victor thought as he stared at the faded sign reading The Zulu Club above the front door. Was he next? The macabre idea came out of nowhere and Victor shook his head to get rid of it. He had sometimes wondered if his family was cursed, having lost both his father and brother to murder in the same club. He tried not to dwell on such thoughts.
His so-called brother’s best friend, Fana, deviously convinces Victor that he is by his side, and that they can make it work; meanwhile, he and the underworld are conspiring to snatch the club from the Zulus. Alas, having burned his fingers at “The Mexican’s” things are set for tragic consequences. As if that were not enough, Victor is also secretly in love with his late brother’s widow, Busi. She, too, has dark secrets from her past, in which she entangles Victor. From there, the stage is set for a sometimes slightly confusing, fast-paced thriller. The themes are infused with the spiritual realms of witchcraft and dark African mythology. Like most books dealing with the shenanigans of the underworld, the book has imposing, flamboyant characters who are there mostly for the atmosphere, rather than character or plot development.
The book feels like Yizo Yizo (whose soundtrack was almost always playing in my head as I read it) meets Kings of Jo’burg, with a winking homage to Vusamazulu (meaning “resurrect the heavens”) Credo Mutwa’s Indaba, my children. The fans of Sifiso Mzobe (who blurbed the book) and his Young blood and Tshidiso Moletsane’s Junx will find much to like in this book. These books fall under the genre termed narcoliterature in Mexico. The pressing question for me is whether this genre has meaningful social and cultural value – whether it is enough for literature just to expose and mirror back to us what is happening in our age. My resounding answer is yes. Literature is not a sub-department of sociology or law, which are compelled to provide policy direction that curbs the ills of our society. And so, I ask these questions not as an apologia for purity of art as a means towards salvation. But, since this is also Youth Month, perhaps it is opportune to take a closer look into the culture of fetishising money as a symbol of the success these books mirror back to us. Have we, as a society, gone too far in obsessing about money as a status symbol, even with glamourised lifestyles that are associated with violent hassling for soft life. Our preoccupation with the Thabo Bester and Nandipha Magudumana saga, the predilections for criminality in order to get rich, and the obsession for soft life at all costs, provide another spotlight for the prevailing values of our society.
Then there’s a Lucky Dube character in Qwabe’s book who has enigmatic tendencies. His preternatural visions introduce us to the mystical abilities of communicating with the dead, like the personality of Henry Cele, through art. Through this, The resurrection limns well our contemporary problems in black communities, our superstitions and gullibility. These make us easy victims to scams (religious and financial). They make us readily appeal to false apotropaic powers when confronted with confounding situations. This, methinks, is also the reason behind the rise of fake appropriation of ukuthwasa (being called by ancestors to be an igqirha) practices, especially with the youth, who appropriate this wrongly as some form of going back to our traditional roots. There is a serious identity crisis within our black communities which manifests mostly in our youth. It leads them to venerate false solutions and shortcuts towards success.
The rise in waves of ukuthwasa has, throughout our history, been our fault line, especially for the Xhosa nation. It was even at the centre of the ancient division of our kingdom. And it is the reason why King Phalo was the last ruler of the united Xhosa nation. Nkosi Rharhabe ultimately lost his respect for his weakling brother, Gcaleka, for meddling with amagqirha because he believed his sickness was a result of not answering his vocation of ukuthwasa. In anger, Rharhabe crossed the iNciba (Kie) River for the final time as a means of avoiding further clashes with his brother, and established his own nation of amaRharhabe. In the same breath, Nxele, aka Makhanda, gained tremendous powers of divination at the same time, when the amaRharhabe under Ndlambe were confounded by land dispossession under the colonising power of white settlers. As such, under the tutelage of his arcane powers, amaNdlambe and amaGqunukhwebe (his own nation) led an organised national suicide know to history as the Nxele/Grahamstown War.
Almost 30 years after that war, the Xhosa men of political power, which included Nxele’s younger brother, Mjuza, and Nongqawuse’s uncle, Mhlakaza, misused two young girls (Nongqawuse and Nonkosi) in order to promote a political message of fomenting opposition against the oppressive British hand. When the Xhosa cattle were dying of a strange lung disease, they asked her to claim that, as a maiden (thus more believable), she had seen the ancestors who had ordered that the Xhosas kill their cattle and not till their land, because of a belief in a coming new world that would be ushered in by the ancestors, who in turn would drive the whites back to the see. The spirit of ukuthwasa was ripe among the Xhosa during all these events, hence that message spread quickly like fire on dry grass. The same applied when the returning black men of the Labour Corps in the European tribal war, otherwise known as WWI, came back carrying seeds of Spanish flu, which killed many people in black villages of the Transkei and Ciskei. The spirit of ukuthwasa rose to a peak even then, because the nation was confounded by a strange disease. A prophetess by the name of Nentetha Nkwenkwe became prominent among many who existed then. The wave of ukuthwasa rose again during the uncertain political years of the early ’90s, towards the end of the apartheid governance, when the white government-sponsored black-on-black violence flared up, and when the racial tensions which culminated with the assassination of Chris Hani were at their peak. You would meet people wearing white clay and clothes as an indication of going through the ceremonies of ubugqirha.
My last critique of Qwabe’s book is on how it seems to depict with glee, rather than shame, the phenomena of glorifying violence, fetishising money as a symbol of success, and misappropriating dark powers as a means of dealing with confounding situations. All the same, I commend the book for delineating well the pathological symptoms of worshiping Mammon, even if it doesn’t provide pressure valves to let off the steam. We may, as I indicated, argue that the artist’s duty is only to mirror our society back on itself. Alas, that attitude is easier said until, like me, you become a parent. Then you worry about the tremendous influence art has in depicting to overly impressionable youth misdirected shortcuts of success. As much as it is not art’s role to parent our children, we cannot fool ourselves, as if we had never heard of such things as the Werther effect – a mysterious urge by readers and consumers of other art forms to imitate (art) acts of suicide.