This article  first appeared on mahala.co.za

It was through a series of unfortunate circumstances that I found myself back home in Kwazulu, a remote village in the Eastern Cape. When I left over ten years ago, I was certain I would never set foot there again. I had been deeply scarred by the things I had seen. People were being burnt alive, others were found mutilated in cornfields. And the one place (home) that was meant to be my place of refuge was a war zone.

Every time I thought of going back home, I would shudder. “Why would I possibly want to go back there?” I would ask myself, even though I knew there would come a day when I would be forced to go back because dad is still a local. For all the sins he committed against his children, dead or alive, life has punished him, in ways I’m not sure he understands. Kwazulu is his little hell.

On my unexpected visit home, I learnt that home perished with the winds of time. In what was once my parents’ bedroom, lay a skinny bitch, its litter suckling hungrily. The shop and dining room are the only rooms still standing. Dad is renting it out to a Pakistani native, for a little over a R1 000 a month. He now lives at his parents’ house, eKhayakhulu. This is all that is left of home.

My grandparents’ residence is a charming three bedroom house, situated at the foot of the mountains right where the village begins. It is flanked by four giant gum trees. There is a thatched skwere (a little flat where the ancestors are consulted). Beyond the massive garden is a river, and beyond that – a mountain, where the shepherd takes his cows, goats and sheep to graze. 

If you wake up early enough you will see the sun as it rises behind the mountains. You will hear the cows bellow. There are hawks too. Dad can’t stand them. They eat his chickens.

It is this alluring beauty that made me stay longer than the 24 hours I had intended to spend. When I got tired of hiking on the mountain behind the house, I decided to venture further down through the village.
That’s when I noticed something unusual about Kwazulu – there was an air of excitement. I hurried down the hill, so I could catch the news while still fresh.

The first person I met was uSibonda (a chieftain). I had to remind him who I was. uSibonda rebuked me for forsaking my roots: “You don’t even come back to visit your own goddamn father,” he said indignantly. His annoyance vanished as quickly as it had appeared when I asked about his daughter Shoes, one of my childhood friends. “That one, we married her off to a man eMvenyane. He paid eight cows for lobola. Eight fat cows I tell you!” He says showing me the number with his hands. “And above all, sicofa incukuthu ngoku,” he said with all the excitement a man his age could muster.

It took a while before what he said sunk in. I had taken the phrase in its literal manner — we press bed bugs? I know bed bugs are a royal pain, but for an entire village to be out on the streets celebrating something so trivial made little sense to me.

It was another old friend, Smirnoff, who brought matters into perspective. “Ngumbela, have you noticed we have electricity now — sicofa incukuthu ngoku? Just two years ago, we got taps. There are nine in the village now. I promise you, civilization has finally come to our corner!”

“How long has it been?” I ask my dear friend. “Just an hour, some houses are not yet connected. Eskom has been generous enough to give each house R5 worth of electricity,” he tells me.

Eventually, I get to my father’s shop. It is packed; pensioners queue up to get a few groceries on credit, and young boys with taut tummies and tattered trousers dart in and out, running errands for the Pakistani man who gives them amakretse (chips) for a job well done.

Here, I meet more familiar faces. They recognise me. For a minute they marvel at how much I’ve grown and mock me for “my weird hairstyle,” (a mohawk). They make comments about the city consuming me along with all common sense. But my heart pounds with glee when the conversation shifts back to the topic of electricity.

“I’m so glad we will never again have to walk to Bonxa to charge our phones,” says a breast-feeding teenage mom. Bonxa is four kilometres out of Kwazulu.

“I can’t stop thinking about the cold water we will have once we get a fridge,” chirps another woman.
“I see all that which you are talking about,” ponders another gogo, “but I dread to think what the village will be like once people buy DVD sets. We will never know peace again”.

The three women all laugh heartily.

Back home, I walk in as my father is plugging in his fridge. He asks me if he’s done it right. “Does it need to be leveled?”

“It’s alright dad,” I reassure him.

Upon hearing this, he puts water in the fridge. Ten minutes later he asks if I’m sure the fridge is working, his water is not yet cold. “Dad, please, the fridge is fine. It’s working.” I think he detects the tinge of annoyance in my voice so he stops asking, but continues making frequent visits to the fridge.

Half an hour later I’m packing my laptop and contemplate going back to a place of familiarity, while my dad sits drinking his first glass of ice-cold water…

*Images © Nwabisa Ngumbela