Mr. Fasana: A Novella
Introducing the new novella by L. Sojini
Author and publisher’s note: I am currently working on a novella which I titled Mr. Fasana. The novella is set in Mpumalanga, a province in South Africa.
I will be self-publishing the text. Sponsorship comes from the National Arts Council. Proofreading was done by William Chauke.
This post marks the first chapter of the novella.
CHAPTER 1
Kwaggafontein landscapes have grown more beautiful and rugged as they have done a great job of absorbing the changes brought by the elements. It would seem odd to see Kwaggafontein as beautiful. The landscapes might be more pleasurable to look at than they were twenty-five years ago, but who knows how they looked twenty-five years before that? There is a possibility the landscape was as beautiful then as it is now.
Those who know the characteristics of the Kwaggafontein landscape would tell you whether to appreciate it or not. The AmaNdebele established Kwaggafontein in the late 1940s. The town is in Nkangala District Municipality. It is a stony area. Mhlanga River is the area’s major river. The river follows the m-shape, with the middle part mostly erased.
Where the river ends at the top, you turn left, and you find a village called Shobane. The village was named after one of Ndzundza’s sons who settled there.
In the autumn of 2001, Mr. Fasana had been running his initiation school for twenty-three years. In the same year, the government managed to make most initiation school owners take up licenses to operate. Mr. Fasana had been one of the dissenters – or late takers of the licences or papers, if you will. If it had been up to him, he would have continued running the school for its entire history without the clunky papers. As a Ndebele man, he believed that Ndebele people should live according to Ndebele tradition.
Swayed by promises that taking up the licences would make their initiation schools progress into the 21st century, most men of tradition had taken up the government offer. For the dissenting Fasana, this ‘progress into the future’ signaled the beginning of the end – or the end of the end. It was the end of tradition, the end of Ndebele tradition and culture, the end of history. All the more reasons he had resisted for most of the time. What was the reason for the papers? His father before him had run the school without them. Even his grandfather and great-grandfather. As such, when a foreign culture, as he saw it, had come to impose the end of tradition, he would not allow his son to inherit a tainted tradition.
Of course, there was money involved.
On the 16-18 March 2001 weekend, his son who worked in town and stayed there, Mpiyabo, was home. On Sunday, Mpiyabo – carrying two stacked chairs in his left hand, a notebook in his right – walked up to his father as he was locking up the cows in the kraal. The son had come to tell him that their list that season had eighty-six boys whose parents had signed up for them to become men.
He put the chairs down, sat on one, opened the notebook, and waited for his father.
‘That is an improvement from last time,’ Fasana said, sitting as well, proceeding to ask routine questions.
‘Here is the budget I drafted. We should discuss it,’ young Fasana said.
Fasana scanned the budget, but as they went through the budget, one item destabilized him, but not so much not to make a mental note that he wanted Mpiyabo to organize a job for Nokuphila. Of course, they would talk about this issue after the budget. ‘What is this all about?’ he said, questioning the digitization item that had destabilized him.
Mpiyabo answered that digitization spoke to the funds they had to put aside for digitizing the poems the initiates would compose during ingoma that year. He also talked about how digitization would be a recurring item on future budgets. ‘It’s about time we digitized the poems initiates compose. This will serve us well if we do it every year.’ Mpiyabo had digitized his poem, a rare occurrence.
Fasana was taking his time to digest what he was being told. ‘Digitize – what? What do you mean? What poems?’ He could not understand.
‘Come on, dad: I’m talking about the poems the initiates compose each time. I’m proposing that money be put aside especially. I belatedly digitized mine; not the year I crossed. I’m proposing that in doing this we’re modernizing parts of an old ritual.’
‘Truth be told, your proposal seems off to me, son,’ Fasana said, thinking that he might forget talking about the job issue. ‘I do not know which part of your proposal puts me off. My blood boils especially when I hear the digitization part. I become very confused, and I lose all understanding. Sad to say, when I hear you talk about the poetry part, I become confused again. Very confused. I have never been so confused in my life. Woo!’
‘Do not be confused, father,’ younger Fasana said. ‘The thing is that if you don’t want to be confused, you must be willing to listen to me and understand. It’s simple, really: we put the poems online – we digitize them, and we’re gonna make it a regular thing.’
At this stage, Fasana had forgotten about the job thingy: there were things he had to school Mpi on. ‘The compositions initiates make are not poems like the poetry you have in your schoolbooks. We have always recited them orally.’
‘That’s the part we have to fix if we want to create a competitive edge.’
Fasana, after hearing this, took longer to answer. He was fuming, his voice was not his normal voice: it was louder now. For a moment, he remembered about the job issue, but he brushed the thought aside.
‘Competitive – how?’
‘If we digitize the poems, then we can keep a true record of the compositions. In that way, we’ll have done away with faulty and unreliable memory.’
This time, Fasana was quick with the answer: ‘Ingoma has always relied on faulty memory, as you put it. This was never a perfect world. The unpredictability of our culture is what makes it African. We were never meant to be a people who keep a perfect memory. Those who want us to keep a perfect memory are people who want us to ditch our culture. Our people were never meant to rely on books and digitization like the whites do. Take away his book and computer, and the white man’s lost – bewildered. Give a black man a book and a computer, and you lose him.’
‘You have a problem with white people,’ young Fasana said.
‘I have a problem with modernity. I have a problem with memory that has to be perfect.’
‘Should we be happy with unreliable memory? It’s dangerous for a single poem to say this today and say another thing tomorrow.’
‘It’s not unreliable or imperfect memory,’ Fasana said. ‘When a poem seems different than it was yesterday, that is keeping up with tradition. You call it unreliability. In truth, it’s embellishment; for a culture without embellishment is a dead culture. A culture that repeats things day in, day out, is no culture. Think of it: year in, year out - you read from the same book. What culture is that? Or it’s the so-called modernity, as you term it? Remember, this goes on century after century. I do not want to know what poem my grandfather composed in the process of becoming a man. You should not know what poem I composed. I should not know either, but does not knowing remove the fact that in becoming a man, I composed a poem? The poem, if I wanted, I could tell you it today, tomorrow or as long as I live, but in each recital, the poem will change. In each recital, I will embellish the poem so as to run from soul-destroying repetition, but put that poem in a book, you have ruined me; you have killed me. Now I have to give the same details. What makes me a man is the fact that I can tell you the same story differently each time I tell it. But for you, kids, that’s boring.’
At this point, Mr. Fasana was thinking that his son was not the ideal person to take care of the initiation school after he was gone. He was slowly and mentally disinheriting him. What is it that they teach at university that made nowadays kids despise their culture, he asked himself. But if not his son to take over, who would? Perhaps by insisting on the importance of isikhethu, he could still win him. It was important that he discuss it with him. At the other end, young Fasana was thinking: ‘If I can make the old man understand the importance of digitization, then we can win this war, and I’ll run the best initiation school in the village’.
The old man was thinking that it would be an embarrassment if he could not convince his son. What is he thinking – does he think that I am a fool? What about me – am I making a fool out of myself?
‘Is everything okay at work?’ Fasana said. ‘I have not seen you this distracted.’
‘Ah, it’s okay at work; just hectic.’
‘You know you could always work here at home,’ Fasana said.
‘I cannot come work here full-time. You know my wife is expecting our second child. I doubt a job here can afford me.’
‘How come?’ Fasana said. ‘This place paid for your university. It raised you. It can take care of your family.’
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