A Sin of Omission Read online

  Eleazor Mbanda was waiting on his porch, evidently on the lookout. ‘Mfundisi!’ A pleasant, cheerful greeting, acknowledging Stephen’s newand greater status with the pride of an avuncular schoolmaster, a generous hand outstretched to take the bridle and bring the horse into the yard.

  Stephen unsaddled and hobbled the horse and entered the house, hat in hand. He sat at the table while Eleazor’s wife made tea and cut slices of bread which she spread with jam. It was a better house than his, securely built. The shelves were lined with paper, the dishes and plates carefully arranged. An easy chair stood by the fireplace.

  A Christian household with a wife and a picture of the Bishop on the wall.

  They said grace before tea and read a passage from the Bible. Four small grandchildren clustered round, neat, clean and silent.

  ‘Where are you going, Mfundisi?’ asked Eleazor.

  ‘To see my mother,’ said Stephen, venturing no further. How could he tell these pious people – both Mfengu – the reason for his journey? Instead, to their delight and astonishment, he told them about England and about his own attempts at carpentry at the Missionary College. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I was something of a wonder because I came with skills they did not expect, especially the master, who thought I must be a savage. I told him I was taught at the Native College in Grahamstown by very good carpenters who are my own people. At first he did not seem to believe me but after a while he chose me above others to help with commissions.’

  The old man nodded his head, musing. ‘Ah yes!’ He sipped his tea. ‘Mr Gawe was a good teacher.’

  ‘And so were you!’ said Stephen, recalling the carpenter’s shop, the rough chisels, the single lathe. ‘Just as good with half the tools!’

  They talked on of the price of timber, the scarcity of work and how best to make a chapel window while the reason for Stephen’s journey remained concealed in his pocket.

  The next day, leaving his borrowed horse in Eleazor’s care, Stephen took the train to Queenstown. The unfolding scene – the aloes and the kiepersols, the euphorbia and the scrubby seams along the riverbeds – bore no resemblance to the familiar countryside of England which he had come to associate with train journeys. He tried to doze but the benches were hard and the coach loud with the voices of passengers. This was not the silence of English travellers, avoiding the eyes of their fellows, barricaded by their newspapers or even by a prayer book.

  ‘Always be prepared for accidents!’ Albert had once whispered wryly in Stephen’s ear as they had boarded a train together, nodding towards an elderly lady holding her Bible up to her face. ‘Insurance against catastrophe! Nor can you imagine what a comfort it is to have a clergyman in the coach!’

  ‘We are not clergymen yet!’

  ‘Ah, but we have the air!’ said Albert, putting on his most pious face so that Stephen had to take out his handkerchief and blow his nose to stop his laughter.

  Now, the people spoke loudly, excitedly, as if the volume might check anxiety as they swayed and rocked together on the benches, shoulders touching, parcels between their feet, knee to knee. Stephen took his prayer book from his pocket – not as an antidote to disaster but so that he could open the page where he kept the precious photograph of the woman, the face transmuted now from vision to reality, each detail memorised and known, even the small blemish beside her ear.

  How often he had gazed at it.

  And how could he ever have a wife like her when he was not a man – tutored, circumcised and initiated into manhood?

  Like Mzamo.

  Stephen had arrived in Canterbury in September 1869. It was nine months before he received a letter from his brother Mzamo. He had long given up hearing from him – or anyone – except Mfundisi Turvey, the Principal of the Native College, acknowledging his frequent letters and relaying news of all his friends. Mzamo’s letter had taken five months to reach him.

  January 1870

  My dear brother,

  You will not have heard from me before but I wish to tell you that I have undertaken the rites of initiation – ubukwetha. Without them I cannot have authority as a Ngqika nor as my father’s son. Do not fear – I am Christian still but this restriction on circumcision by the English is a mark of disrespect and a trick to oppress black Christians – for if our own people see the uninitiated as children, why shouldn’t they continue to treat us as such as well?

  After leaving the College and a tiresome time at Mfundisi Rutherford’s mission I decided to seek our home and once there, obeyed my father’s wish to proceed to the circumcision school. Afterwards, I did not return to the mission but went directly to Grahamstown and spoke to the Bishop about work. He was very high with me for ‘disappearing’ but, I suspect, he did not question too closely what I had been doing because he knows he cannot afford to throw away the expense of my education. Nor can he grieve for what he does not know so any word about circumcision was avoided! I do not think he will have mentioned it to Mfundisi Turvey either although I suspect that the wise old fellow knows better.

  So, brother, I am now interpreter to the Magistrate. He is the gentleman who used to come to the College when we performed the scenes from Shakespeare. He speaks no Kaffir and is hard of hearing and asked for a man who could be trusted to understand and use his very words.

  He had mentioned nothing further of their mother but wrote that their father had gone off again on yet another sojourn digging the government’s roads. He had made no inquiries about England to which Stephen might reply. He had supplied an address in Grahamstown, care of their old school friend, Vuyo Tontsi. He added at the end of the letter:

  I am shortly to be married to Tontsi’s sister, Nokhanyiso. She is a member of the choir at St Philip’s where I am choirmaster. The nuptials will take place in the new church which you have not seen. It will be an important gathering as her father is a chief.

  The only other information had been of the cricket club he and Tontsi had started in the community: We will soon be able to challenge the fellows at the Native College to a match. Stephen had had to wait for his return to Grahamstown to appreciate Mzamo’s prominence in the community or the lustre he’d acquired beyond the status of a man whose brother was in England.

  As the train drew into the station, Stephen gathered up his things, gazing expectantly from the window, waiting for the last of the thorn trees to slip by and the platform to come into view. Alfred would be waiting for him, his trap and horse in the yard.

  – Don’t worry, old chap, I’ll always be there to welcome you, wherever you might be.

  The remark had been made with touching eagerness long ago when Stephen was packing in the dormitory at the College in Canterbury on the eve of his return to the Cape. The great Cathedral tower in its age and permanence had brooded beyond the window, an arc of pigeons flaring out across a pale evening sky.

  ‘But we’ll be together,’ Stephen had said. ‘They promised to post us in pairs.’

  ‘Of course,’ Albert had replied without conviction, bending to inspect his boots and rub the edge of his sleeve across the top of them.

  Stephen had gazed at him in consternation. ‘The Warden wouldn’t break his promise!’ Albert had not replied and Stephen had hurried on. ‘Toyise and Wilson went together last year. Don’t you remember? With that fellow who looks like a stork? We all have to work together or the whole venture will fail.’

  ‘Politics,’ said Albert.

  ‘We are churchmen.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said Albert and laughed, as if it were a joke.

  Stephen stepped down from the train with his bag and looked about him. The other passengers were taking their luggage and walking out into the road beyond. There were some wagons drawn up, there was a horse or two tethered to a hitching post. There was no Albert Newnham pacing the platform, jaunty with welcome.

  Long, long ago Mzamo had said, ‘Never think that white men are your fathers or your brothers, no matter what they say. They will promise you one thing and they will do another. What about all those boys who thought they were Sir George Grey’s sons because they took his name? When he went as Governor to New Zealand he did not even bother to answer their letters.’

  ‘My father was still my father though he never wrote me a letter,’ Stephen had retorted.

  ‘Only because your father did not know how to write.’

  Stephen went out into the road and gazed up and down it in dismay. No doubt his letter had not reached Albert.

  – There was a delay in sending it on from town to the mission station.

  – There was a swollen river.

  – There was a shortage of horses going north.

  Stephen felt in his jacket for his pocketbook, extracted it and counted out his money. How was he to hire a cart or even a horse to complete his journey to the mission on the Indwe River? And would Albert have a fresh horse at the mission that he could ride further, heading east towards the country where, after his father’s disappearance, his mother had settled with her brother’s people? It was his own fault, for he had added a postscript: If I am delayed and miss you at the station, I will make my own way to St Paul’s.

  It had been a courtesy, like his objections when accepting teas – an attempt at acknowledging the debt, knowing that, of course, Albert would be there, never keeping score or expecting a return.

  Stephen picked up his bag and walked along the street, gazing all about him as he went in case he saw a trap with Albert riding high, flourishing his whip and calling his halloos. He trudged on until he reached the outskirts of the town.

  – I will make my own way to St Paul’s.

  Perhaps, this time, Albert had taken him at his word. After all, how could Albert know how small his stipend was? It was his own fault that he’d been too ash
amed to tell him, demeaned by the difference made between them at the synod.

  – Native deacons will earn half.

  Even those who’d been to Canterbury.

  As Albert had not yet arrived in the Cape when Stephen had attended his first synod, how could he have guessed the truth?

  Stephen walked on in the hope that any passing vehicle would give him a lift. He had his doubts. What would the people think of a clergyman covered with dust, without conveyance, his bag slung on a rough stick over his shoulder?

  Most would believe he was an imposter.

  That is what they had believed of the dear old Bishop when, as Archdeacon, he had tramped the diocese begging a night’s shelter in a stable or a hut. He was often turned from a door as a rogue. And when he had declared that Jesus was born in a stable and always walked with his disciples, the retort was that if Jesus had had access to a horse – as any respectable Englishman in the Colony did – he would have used it!

  Stephen also knew what it was to be treated as an imposter. How he remembered the sliding glances in an English teashop when he sat down to cake with Albert, the hastily withdrawn stares of women, the unconcealed curiosity of children, the slight derision on the faces of men.

  – Who does he think he is?

  It was only the elderly maiden ladies or clergy wives who hustled him into their drawing rooms, showering him with food until he felt like a pigeon in a park, stuffed with crumbs left over from the Sunday cake.

  Stephen walked until well into the afternoon when a cart passed by. He called out and, some paces down the road, it slowed and the driver stood up, turned and beckoned. Stephen raised his hand. He proffered a fare and was invited to climb up. He sat on a sack, face to face with a lean dog, its shoulders hitched, its ears flattened back against its head in the wind. It curled a lip each time he moved. He avoided its malevolent gaze and exchanged news with the driver.

  It was nightfall when they reached a populous place, a mixture of huts and byres around a crooked church made of corrugated iron with a wooden cross on its gable. The driver of the cart pointed to it with his whip and, gingerly, Stephen alighted, the dog barking sharply as he pulled his bag down. It continued to bark as the cart trundled away, weaving back and forward across the tailboard, hackles up.

  The Minister at the crooked church was a Nonconformist. He offered Stephen supper, welcomed him into his house but seemed ill at ease, allowing long silences to punctuate their conversation until Stephen mentioned Albert Newnham.

  Ah, he knew the Mfundisi by sight. Always so neat. The man pointed to his eyes and laughed. ‘Mehlomane. Four eyes,’ he said. ‘A person from this district is helping him to learn isiXhosa. It is not easy – he does not hear the language.’

  All those lessons in Canterbury for nothing? And Albert saying ingenuously, his finger on a word in his exercise book, ‘For a savage language it’s very complicated, Stephen.’

  ‘Is an Englishman the only one who can have advanced thoughts?’

  ‘Sorry, old chap, I didn’t mean that. I meant – well, for a language that’s only recently written, it has so many rules.’

  It was much more fun for Albert to watch Stephen grasp the rules of chess than to twist his tongue around words he had never heard spoken in a real conversation in his life. ‘You outmanoeuvre everyone like a general with his troops,’ he’d said admiringly.

  ‘Well, my father is isandla sokunene of a great chief,’ Stephen had replied.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A man of weight and authority. He sits at the chief’s right hand – sisandla sokunene – and advises him.’

  ‘Would you have been a great sokunene – or whatever you call it – if you had remained a heathen?’

  ‘I shall be a greater isandla sokunene if I am a priest – so you had better stop fooling about when I bring you my Latin.’

  In the morning when wreaths of smoke from early fires drifted between the houses and the boys were driving the goats to pasture, the minister asked Stephen to join him in his church for prayers. The room was furnished only with a table and a wooden stand for a Bible, the windows were without arches and the pews were a set of benches. The floor was polished dung. There was no altar with cloth or candlesticks. How much the same and yet how different from his own small mission church with its formal altar, its cross and its rose-coloured frontal made by the parish ladies in Canterbury. And yet, in this simple church, not kneeling but sitting, head bowed, listening to the murmured prayer offered for them both, Stephen transcended, fleetingly, the awe he had experienced in a great cathedral in a foreign land.

  He was not an imposter here – a curiosity – but a fellow man.

  Chapter Four

  When Stephen was twelve and Mzamo sixteen they were sent to the Native College in Grahamstown. Stephen was chosen for his diligence, Mzamo for his intellect but also, the Principal suspected, because Mzamo was a handful at Rutherford’s mission.

  Rutherford had written:

  He questions everything. He constantly asks why the English churches are so hostile to each other. Is their God not the same? (The Dissenters have a mission nearby so their influence on the local people has been pernicious.) He even had the impertinence to challenge me for drawing water from the river on a Sunday! He is a leader and has a keen sense of his own nobility and he is alert to the fact that the English Church is the church of Her Majesty and therefore the most prestigious (my wife has been reading to our boys the history of England. Imagine – they are well-versed in the Wars of the Roses!) Should you curb him he will be a great asset to our civilising mission among the Gaikas. Undoubtedly, he will be influential in time.

  So off they went, equipped with new Blucher boots, a pair of mole-skin trousers, their jackets repaired and lengthened and two flannel shirts each, sewn by the mission girls from fabric donated by the Bishop’s wife. They were joined by another three scholars from a distant station who had all chosen the name ‘George’ on their baptism, in honour of the Governor.

  ‘My goodness, three young Georges!’ Mrs Rutherford had exclaimed. ‘Surely we could be more original than that!’

  It was not a matter of originality but of respect.

  Was it not the custom among English sons to take the name of their fathers? George Mandyoli Maqoma, grandson of the great Xhosa general, had already been in England for a year, along with Boy Henry Duke of Wellington Tshatshu. They were being educated by the Reverend Savage at Nuneaton.

  ‘What lions they will be!’ the Bishop had rejoiced.

  Since then there had been a plethora of Georges, and the Governor, Sir George Grey, had pronounced before his departure for a posting in New Zealand that, despite the distance, he was still the father of them all. No matter how numerous his sons, those named George, it seemed, could claim his eternal interest – even if their letters to him went unanswered.

  ‘What name will you choose?’ Stephen had asked his brother when, after months of instruction by Mfundisi Rutherford, he was considered ready for baptism.

  ‘I am Mzamo. You are Malusi.’

  ‘Those are not the names of a Christian.’

  ‘They are the names given by our father.’

  ‘Mfundisi Rutherford says we cannot be considered Christians without a Christian name. I am Stephen now.’

  ‘Yes. You are Stephen,’ said Mzamo. ‘Until you change your mind.’

  ‘Why should I change my mind?’

  ‘Do you know who Stephen was?’

  ‘He was a martyr who was stoned to death,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Yes! And without complaining. What use is that? He should have raised his voice, taken up a stone and hurled it back.’

  It was without any sense of irony that Mfundisi Rutherford chose to call Mzamo ‘Saul’, St Stephen’s persecutor. It was a name Mzamo refused to acknowledge, despite its being written on his certificate of baptism and entered in the Mission Register.

  ‘I am Mzamo Mzamane,’ he insisted stubbornly. An indication of intransigence which did not go unnoticed.

  The Native College in Grahamstown was set on a hill among the grander houses and villas of the town. The dormitory windows looked out towards the road running past the toll house. Beyond, the wagons climbed in steady procession along the pale sand track, the teams of oxen sending up plumes of dust in the dry weather. When it was wet the wheels often stuck in ruts and the students were summoned by the toll-keeper to help him lift them out. Mzamo and Vuyo Tontsi sometimes boasted that they would climb aboard one day and disappear into the interior to seek their fortunes.