Authors write of home and exile, freedom and loss
Mandla Langa and Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s new novels, “The Lost Language of the Soul” and “The Wanderers”, intersect in their reflections on the lives of Umkhonto we Sizwe freedom fighters.
NOVELIST, poet and short story writer Mandla Langa’s latest book, The Lost Language of the Soul, is a comingof-age tale set in Zambia and apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s. The novel chronicles the odyssey of Joseph Mabaso, the son of an Umkhonto we Sizwe soldier who goes in search of his mother after her disappearance from their home in Lusaka. The search takes Langa’s teenage protagonist through towns and borders until he ends up in South Africa.
History is also at the heart of Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s fiction. He won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize in 2019 for The Broken River Tent, a novel about the life and times of Maqoma, the Xhosa traditional leader who was at the forefront of fighting British colonialism in the Eastern Cape during the 19th century. His new novel, The Wanderers, tells the story of a South African woman’s search for her father, Phaks, an exiled freedom fighter who never returned home, even after apartheid had been dismantled.
How did each of you relate to the idea of Umkhonto we Sizwe when you were growing up? Mandla, you were part of the June 16 detachment.
Mandla Langa: My first encounter with the idea of Umkhonto we Sizwe started quite early, well before I left home for exile in 1976. My eldest brother Sam had a friend who was a teacher, and I could gather from the conversations in our house in Mayville, Durban, that there was some unease about the fact that this friend had left the country. And in those days, when leaving the country to go into exile, people would say that he’s left the country to go to Russia.
And then there was my other brother Ben, who used to tune in to these foreign radio frequencies. And on one of those frequencies, I think, the ANC was actually broadcasting not from Ethiopia but from the Soviet Union, and somehow Ben was able to get that frequency. And that’s when I started to know that there were things called Umkhonto we Sizwe, that they were people who were out there, learning how to fight, who would then come back and become part of the liberation army in South Africa.
Then much later, in 1972, I was a member of the Black Consciousness Movement, and at that time there were people who were already quite unhappy about the trajectory or the pace of the Struggle. People like Keith Mokoape, who then later became one of the commanders of Umkhonto we Sizwe. At the General Students’ Council in Hammanskraal in 1972, Keith and two others declared that they were sick and tired of student politics, and that they were going to leave the country and go and join Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Those three, in essence, for me, became physical embodiments of what Umkhonto we Sizwe was. Then of course I myself left to join in 1976.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni: I also grew up in the townships and at some stage it became fashionable, people going to join Umkhonto we Sizwe and all those things. Many of them didn’t return, although some did. But I was always interested in those who decided not to return. Some stayed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, some went to places like Sweden and others stayed in Tanzania, etc. But I wasn’t really looking for a particular Umkhonto we Sizwe story.
When I write, I always try to find what happens when history collides with personal experience. I was always kind of baffled by those who decided not to come back. What is the story behind that decision? Did they feel betrayed by what had happened? As a novelist, I’m drawn to unhealthy silences and that was my motivation.
Mphuthumi, you wrote in a recent essay for the Sunday Times: “I’m deliberate in my reading of history. I look for conflicting truths, suppressed facts, unhealthy silences, to create fictional parallel worlds.” Can you expand on these unhealthy silences? And what are some of the conflicting truths and suppressed facts you bumped up against while writing “The Wanderers”?
Mphuthumi Ntabeni: When we write about our history, we tend to write about that generation that went into exile in 1976, but not the people who stayed behind during the 1980s, which I think was the most chaotic time in our townships. That chapter is just kind of left behind, as if there was nothing happening, and when we talk now, we talk only about that generation that came back from exile.
I wanted to use the generation of 1976 (in The Wanderers) to fill that gap, and I also wanted to alert those who don’t know that a lot of things were happening in the townships. We lost a lot of people, and there was a lot of confusion. When we listen to people from exile, they often say we have no idea how much apartheid security forces affected people. People were suspicious of each other, you could never know who was a spy and who was not, but the same thing was happening in the townships. Some of the people who died didn’t only die at the hands of the apartheid regime, they died at the hands of our own people.
My township in Queenstown, Mlungisi, for instance, has the invidious honour of being known as the first township where the practice of necklacing started. I can remember how easily those things used to happen. I remember that chaos of almost everybody being suspected of being an apartheid spy. So that’s the confusion I wanted to depict in my book, to say that there was also this and it’s not right for us to keep quiet about it, because we lost a lot of people. And when we look back, you realise that most of them were totally innocent.