HAUNTED BY A SUNKEN SHIP
THE STORY about the sinking of the SS Mendi has haunted me since I was a child. Unlike many childhood tales, I acquired this story not from the mouths of my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother, both of whom shaped my imagination through the tales they told me, this story first reached me through the medium of music.
As a young boy, I loved music so much that I became part of Ingede Higher Primary School choir as a tenor. We sang pieces by both European and African choral composers – everyone from Handel to RT Caluza. We sang in Zulu, my mother tongue, in Sesotho, Xhosa, and even English, which was a language so foreign to us that even though we sang these foreign songs with gusto and confidence, most of the time we did not know what they were all about. We just concentrated on the notes, on the music, twisting our tongues around strange words.
Then we were introduced to a haunting dirge, Amagorha eMendi. Written in Xhosa, the short piece of music was composed by Jabez Foley, one of the most illustrious black composers, in memory of the more than 600 men who had gone down with the Mendi when it met its demise off the coast of the Isle of Wight.
Having internalised the song, I started hearing more stories about these soldiers. Maybe the stories had always been there – it was just that they did not make sense before then. The song had contextualised and humanised the lives of these men.
When I reached Standard 9 and read South African history at a more advanced level, reference was again made to the sinking of the SS Mendi. But it was just a footnote to a chapter on South Africa’s involvement in the war. The ancestors whispering to me and my classmates through the pages of that book were silent on why black men had enlisted in a war that was clearly not theirs in the first place. Why would they throw in their lot with the British crown, the very authorities who had not so long ago enacted the Native Land Act of 1913, which had seen the country’s black majority being consigned to 13% of the land? The very crown that had imposed countless taxes upon them? The very crown that had put the final nail in the coffin of the Zulu kingdom? Why would they support a regime that had continuously denied them the right to vote, that had denied them a say in the affairs of the “native” community, as blacks were still then called?
Years later, when I was already a journalist and novelist, I realised that the hooks of the Mendi story were digging deeper into my psyche. I realised that, in order to exorcise myself of the Mendi demons, I simply had to write the story once and for all. But where to begin? Were the survivors still alive? How to locate them? Imagine my exhilaration, then, when, in 2004, I chanced upon a book by Norman Clothier called Black Valour – The South African Native Labour Contingent, 1916 to 1918 and the Sinking of the Mendi.
I wolfed down the 177-page book in one sitting, after which I wrote an opinion piece on the subject – for Rapport newspaper. A year later I, and two other journalists, were invited by the French government for a two-week briefing on that government’s revised foreign affairs policy with specific reference to Africa. During our stay there, at no urging from our side, we were driven from Paris all the way to the coast, where we were given a tour of South African war graves. And there, in Dieppe, the graves of some of the members of the Native Labour Contingent were pointed out. Coincidence? Fate?
It was after having seen the battle scenes and the graves that I began thinking about taking Clothier’s book further – by bringing to life the individual stories of these men, by creating something of an epic in memory of their selflessness and courage. It is no coincidence that South Africa’s highest national order for bravery is the Order of Mendi. The story of the Mendi is at the heart of our nationhood, but we have yet to do justice to this narrative. This is my humble contribution towards this effort.