She did not want to read it. She wanted to move on; in her mind this chapter was closed.
MPAYIPHELI? THE PRINCE FROM THE PAST
isn'?t it strange how much power two words can have? Just two random words, sixteen simple letters, and when I heard them over the radio in my car, it opened the floodgates of the past, and the memories came rushing back like rippling white water.
Thobela Mpayipheli.
I did not think about the meaning of the words? that came later, as I sat down to write this piece: Thobela means ?mannered? or ?respectful.? Mpayipheli is Xhosa for ?one who does not stop fighting?? a warrior, if you will.
My people like to give our children names with a positI've meaning, a sort of head start to life, a potential self-fulfilling prophecy. (Our white fellow-citizens attempt the same sort of thing? only opting not for meaning but for sophistication, the exotic or cool to do the job. And my colored brothers seem to choose names that sound as much uncolored as possible.)
What really matters, I suppose, is the meaning the person gives to the name in the course of his life.
So, what I remembered as I negotiated early-morning rush hour was the man. Or the boy, as I knew him, for Thobela and I are children of the Ciskei; we briefly shared one of the most beautiful places on earth: the Kat river valley, described by historian Noel Mostert in his heartbreaking book
We were teenagers and it was the blackest decade of the century, the tumultuous seventies: Soweto was burning, and the heat of the flames could be felt in our little hidden hamlet, our forgotten valley. There was something in the air in the spring of 1976, an anticipation of change, of things to come.
Thobela Mpayipheli, like me, was fourteen. A natural athlete, the son of the Muruti of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, and it was well known that his father was a descendant of Phalo along the Maqoma lineage. Xhosa royalty, if you will.
And there was something princely about him, perhaps in his bearing, most definitely in the fact that he was a bit of a loner, a brooding, handsome outsider of a boy One day in late September, I was witness to a rare event. I saw Mpayipheli beat Mtetwa, a huge, mean, scowling kid two years his senior. It was a long time coming between the two of them, and when it happened, it was a thing of beauty. On a sliver of river sand in a bend of the Kat, Thobela was a matador, calm and cool and elegant and quick. He took some shuddering punches, because Mtetwa was no slouch, but Thobela absorbed it and kept on coming. The thing that fascinated me most was not his awesome deftness, his speed or agility, but his detachment. As if he were measuring himself. As if he had to know if he was ready, confirmation of some inner belief.
Just three years later he was gone, and the whispers up and down the valley said he had joined the Struggle, he had left for the front, he was to be a soldier, a carrier of the Spear of the Nation.
And here his name was on the radio, a man on a motorcycle, a fugitive, a common laborer, and I wondered what had happened in the past twenty years. What had gone wrong? The prince should have been a king? of industry, or the military, perhaps a member of Parliament, although, for all his presence, he lacked the gift of the gab, the oily slick-ness of a politician.
So I called his mother. It took some time to track them down, a retired couple in a town called Alice.
She didn?'t know. She had not seen her son in more than two decades. His journey was as much a mystery to her as it was to me. She cried, of course. For all that was lost? the expectations, the possibilities, the potential. The longing, the void in a mother?s heart.
But she also cried for our country and our history that so cruelly conspired to reduce the prince to a pauper.
43.
The late afternoon brought a turning point. With every hour his frustration and impatience grew. He no longer wished to wait there; he wanted to know where the dog was, how far off, how long to wait. His eyes were tired from staring down the road, his body stiff from sitting and standing and leaning against the car. His head was dulled by continually running through his calculations, from speculation and guesswork.
But above all it was the anger that exhausted him; the stoking of the raging flames consumed his energy.
Eventually when the shadows began to lengthen, Captain Tiger Mazibuko leaped from the Golf and picked up a rock and hurled it at the thorn trees where the finches were chittering irritably and he roared something unintelligible and turned and kicked the wheel of the car, threw another stone at the tree, another and another and another, until he was out of breath. He blew down with a hiss of air through his teeth and calm returned.
Mpayipheli was not coming.
He had taken another road. Or the wounds perhaps ? No, he was not going to start speculating again? it was irrelevant; his plan had failed and he accepted it. Sometimes you took a chance and you won, and sometimes you lost. He made a decision, he would wait till sunset, relax, watch the day fade to twilight and the twilight to dark, and then he was done.
When he climbed back in the car they came for him.
Three police vehicles full of officials in uniform. He saw the three vehicles approaching, but it registered only when they stopped. He realized what was going on only when they poured out of the doors. He sat tight, hands on the steering wheel, until one shouted at him to get out with his hands behind his head.
He did that slowly and methodically, to prevent misunderstandings.
What the hell?
He stood by the Golf, and a pair of them ducked into the car. One emerged triumphant with the Heckler & Koch. Another searched him with busy hands, pulled his hands behind his back, and clamped the handcuffs around his wrists.
Sold out. He knew it. But how? And by whom?
