Review: Dancing The Death Drill

“AJI!” is the sound made by the men of the SS Mendi as they dance the death drill in Fred Khumalo’s latest novel. The scene is the chaos of the ship as it begins to sink. “AJI!” the men shout  in between the ship’s chaplain’s ferocious exhortations - “ASIKOYIKI SPORHO!" “AJI!” - the call and response of Anglican Catholicism turned on it’s head in this final eucharist, this moment of death’s arrival.

Fred Khumalo’s Dancing The Death Drill (Penguin Random House) comes on the centenary of the sinking of the Mendi off the coast of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. With nearly 1000 men on board, it travelled for a month before losing 646 men when it crashed with the cargo steamship, the Darro, that fateful night in February of 1917. It is but one in a series of tragedies in Khumalo’s masterpiece of a tale - each one a subtle warning.

A story that begins with a scene of deceptive serenity: it’s a quiet day at the Tour d’Agent - the famous restaurant at 18 Quai de la Tournelle, with it’s panoramic views of the Seine, in Paris. The protagonist is staring out of the window, lost in his reverie as he reflects on the events of his life that have brought him to the point of his retirement. Khumalo’s protagonist is a man of many names. Yet he is a man who has succeeded in becoming no one, despite all the potential to be someone. Until, that is, that fateful afternoon in 1958. Within a few pages of setting the restaurant scene, two men are butchered in that same dining room - after one of them called the soon to be retired head waiter a “kaffir”.

It is a double murder that is as mind-boggling in its desperation as it is jarring within the context of all that precedes it. You’d need to be covered in teflon and vaseline to not be gripped at this point. From here on, the pace of story is unrelenting, as we are hurtled into the past at breakneck speed. Beginning first with the Anglo-Boer War and on to First World War before being brought rushing back to the point where the story begins.

For just over 280 pages Khumalo takes us on a journey through the history of South Africa. The story is told through a streetwise smart mouth self-exiled South African artist named Jerry Moloto (rhymes with Gerard Sekoto?) whose voice is almost immediately lost as the author gets down to the main business of the book. 

Into the gaps between the exclamation points and full stops of history, between short sharp bursts of heroism and villainy are the lives of ordinary people not often told. Dooming subsequent generations - ours included - to a lifetime of catching stompies around issues such as racial identity and land and nationalism. The nameless faceless heroes who perished on their way to fight a proxy war - for the return to their own nations some sense dignity and pride.

“The old lie: /Dulce at decorum est /pro patria mori” scoffs Wilfred Owen, in his 1917 poem about the same war. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” but even a native of those cold European lands could see right through the lie the South African Native Corps were only so eager to die for.

Khumalo’s book comes at a time when traditional heroes are being revealed by history to be mere mortals. Where such homilies about nationalism as the title of Owen’s poem are laid bare for the lies they truly are. A time when the lie of Mandela’s Rainbow, now long evident, is joined by the lie of liberation as the structural realities of apartheid remain intact. Lies, which, according to Khumalo’s partially fictional retelling of the story, black South Africans wanted to believe even as far back as the First World War.

“Abelungu ngoswayini /basincitshitiye /basibize oswayini” the cadence of the axes of the men of the South African Native Corps (SANC) hacking away at the pines in the forests of Normandy. A land, the men of the SANC soon learn, of opposites. Where a black Lovedale educated sergeant is in charge (albeit, in a limited capacity) and where the white soldiers are the natives.

The chant is confirmation that the men of the Native corps have finally come to the realisation that no amount of ingratiating themselves to empire will ever return the dignity and humanity denied to them by colonisation. That no amount of respectability will bring equality with their white colonisers and oppressors. It is a sentiment that seems to echo in the hearts of the today’s young South Africans who look at the Rainbow Nation project and respond with “uit die blou van kwaMsunu”.

It is as Mqhayi writes in his ode to those hapless souls, when he says:

Thina, nto zaziyo, asothukanga nto

Sibona kamhlophe, sithi bekumele

Sitheth’engqondweni, sithi bekufanele

Xa bekungejalo bekungayi kulunga

And so, now that we know, now that we say it was meant to be, we can begin to waken from the fog of reconciliation and begin the necessary and difficult work of dismantling those systems and frameworks that continue to yoke us to the expectations of our colonial masters. The work of reclamation and reformation. The work of renaissance. To face the ghosts of the past and fearlessly shout "ASIKOYIKI SPORHO!”

Blackass - A Review

Somewhere out there, Rachel Dolezal is reading Igoni Barrett’s debut novel, Blackass, thinking “why do black people get to have all the fun?”. Although, one might suppose Ms Dolezal wouldn’t be much impressed with the direction of Furo Wariboko’s transition. After all, for decades, Ms Dolezal made this transition into a white woman daily in her alone, quiet moments, and occasionally to old friends and close family. To the rest of the world, and for all intents and purposes, she was a black woman. What Ms Dolezal might envy in Furo is the permanent state of his transition. A complete transformation into the coveted, the desired. But one would also wonder if Furo really wants to be a white man. (Just as it boggles the giblets of damn near any black person why someone white would volunteer themselves to experience first-hand the violence doled out by whiteness that black people experience on the daily, both overtly and covertly.)

Oh sure there are the obvious benefits: the coushy job for which Furo - apart from having the semblance of a white man - is nowhere near qualified for because, you see, Furo made things to his modules in university that made his degree to be done only just (which, if Nigerian Twitter is to be believed - and yes, yes it is - is less than abject failure in the eyes of Nigerian parents and the wider community). Also, he has never even read any of the books he’s supposed to be marketing  - wholesale - to accomplished Lagosian businessmen. Then there is Syreeta - a woman who is so far above Furo’s paygrade (even after being employed at a much higher position than he initially applied for - coz, white), that she ends up bankrolling their situationship thanks to the unknowing assistance of her blesser - a Grade A blesser at that, who is basically footing the bill for the flat that makes their lovenest in an upmarket surburb of Lagos (as well as Furo’s new work clothes). These are the benefits that come with the privilege of whiteness, to which Furo adopts a dala what you must approach to life coz now suddenly his (white) balls have descended and feels himself to be a man. Just now this guy was hiding in his room from his mother, afraid of her reaction to his sudden and extreme luminosity.

Even with these benefits from it, whiteness is still a curious thing in a city like Lagos with its population of anywhere between 8 million (according to the official 2006 census) and 21 million (a 2015 unofficial estimate) of mostly black people. Perhaps in all the continent, only in South Africa is it commonplace to encounter ypipo without wondering where they’re from, why they’re here and when they’re leaving. In fact, it has often been said by Africans from places not within the imaginary boundaries of South Africa, that one scarcely considers oneself black until one finds oneself immersed in the inescapable whiteness of South Africa.

‘“You this olofofo woman, I been think set you get sense, … You never see oyibo before?’”

But the black of Nigeria’s Lagos is that of black people whose determined blackness has caused them to universally and quite successfully break the Queen’s English. And then to put it together again in lyrical pidgin, resplendent with idioms that cause the hearts of every African logophile to sing. A syntax and a lexicon all of its own, which Barrett uses with delicious liberal relish in the dialogue of his most obstinate characters. For a lot of it, unless you are familiar with the bending of the over 500 Nigerian tongues from which the algorithm that forms Nigerian speech is derived, you will lose some of the meaning but the gist is carried in the music of the performance. Barrett puts you there without overwhelming you with a back story. After all, it’s not his fault you haven’t bothered to brush up on your Igbo/Yoruba history - didn’t everyone get warned about starving Biafran children whenever you didn't want to finish your supper?

“‘Dirty Yoruba rat!’”

“‘Old Igbo mumu.’”

“‘Bastard son of kobo-kobo ashewo!’”

“‘Useless illiterate woman.’”

Africa is full of pidgins, creoles and languages that have evolved from conflict and collaboration with the project of colonisation, from Swahilli in the East to Fanakalo and Afrikaans in the South - all languages that evolved out of servitude to empire. In Nigeria, it seems, it is not common to find an oyibo speaking this pidgin as fluently as Furo does, which not unexpectedly, raises eyebrows.

“‘Abeg, no vex, but you be albino?’”

In a moment of brazen risk taking, the author devises a way of inserting himself into the story. It’s a little jarring. It fits awkwardly and is managed by the author in a manner reminiscent of a Nollywood film plot - convenient and outrageously improbable. It’s a kind of subversive meta-pidgin of storytelling - where the conventional rules that inform acceptance of writing/film from the Commonwealth of the United Kingdom are twisted and bludgeoned the same way the Nigerian pidgin does the same to the language of the realm. It’s an experiment that doesn’t quite go as planned and the recovery is rather clumsy. For instance, there’s the denouement, a chapter titled “METAMORPHOSES” where the parallel between being transgendered and being transracial is made which derives directly from this point of self-insertion. It’s the novel’s lowest point for reasons that would detract greatly from the review of what is an otherwise triumph of decolonising the African novel.