Sometimes There Is a Void Read Online Free

in black and white photographs in my father’s album – my only material inheritance from him. That and a number of LPs of Frank Sinatra, Marian Anderson, the Beatles, King
Kong (the South African musical), Ella Fitzgerald, Satchmo, Handel’s Messiah, Dark City Sisters, Jim Reeves, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Singing Bells and thirty or so others that he collected when he was a member of a record club from 1963 to 1966. The photo album is the only thing that I still have. The music albums went with my furniture and books when an ex-wife sold my stuff after an acrimonious divorce.
    Sister Eusebia, a group of other nuns and the secondary school students in gym-dresses and white shirts still smile at me in black and white whenever I don a surgical mask to page through the photo album. The mask is essential because the dust mites that have accumulated between the pages over a period of more than five decades make me cough and sneeze and cry and itch all over whenever I visit those venerable pages. The mask, however, does not prevent the pain I still feel when I look at the angelic picture of a smiling Father Sahr – he of the Order of Mary Immaculate. His car killed my dog Rex when he drove through Goodwell once. Rex liked to bark at cars that drove on the dirt road in front of my grandfather’s estate. And Manqindi – the name we gave to the German Catholic priest because one of his hands did not have fingers, the result of an incident in some world war – did not even stop his car after killing my Rex in cold blood. I vowed I would never own another dog for Father Sahr to kill. Since then I have never had another dog, though of course I have long stopped blaming the poor priest.
    What strikes me as I drive past the Catholic mission is that it still looks the same. In fifty-five years nothing has been added; nothing has been taken away. All the stone buildings with red roofs are exactly as I remember them. Even the house where we lived when I was born. My father must have celebrated his new job at St Teresa’s Native Secondary School with my conception, for I was born on the sixth of October, 1948, nine months after he joined the staff.
    I wasn’t born in that house, though, but at Mlamli Hospital a few kilometres from the mission station. My father named me Zanemvula, which has the double meaning of ‘the rain bringer’ and ‘the one who has been brought by rain’. I do not think the heavens opened up and wept when I was born. Rather, I was named after a character in Ingqumbo
Yeminyanya , the isiXhosa novel by A C Jordan that was published in 1940 and years later translated into English by the author as The Wrath of the Ancestors . It was hailed as one of Africa’s finest novels. It captivated readers because of its lyrical prose and its treatment of Western intrusion on the culture of amaXhosa. But what captivated my father most was that the novel was about our clan, the amaMpondomise people.
    Father Sahr would not baptise me into the Roman Catholic Church without what he called a Christian name, which had to be a saint’s name. But my father, an ardent Pan Africanist, insisted that he would not give me a ‘white name’, so he opted for Kizito, after the youngest of the Ugandan Martyrs. Although Kizito had only been beatified at the time and was not yet a fully fledged saint (he has since been canonised), the priest approved. My third name, Gatyeni, was my father’s way of giving a nod to his ancestors by naming me after one of them.
    My earliest memory resides in that house. I was three years old when mother and father came home with two babies in fluffy white. They were the twins, Sonwabo and Monwabisi, fresh from Mlamli Hospital and smelling of Johnson’s Baby Powder. They were not my favourite people because they seemed to grab all my parents’ attention. These usurpers spent a lot of time crying or sleeping. When they were sleeping and