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I swear I had nothing to do with it, but when he searched me and found a big knife in my pocket the crime fitted me very well. Not only had I disgraced my mother by engaging in criminal activities, I had also stolen a knife from her special set of braai knives and forks with carved ivory handles. My protestations that I had only carried the knife to impress my friends did not convince her. She had had enough of me, and she wrote to my father to fetch me and take me to his own parents at Qoboshane. Under normal circumstances I loved visiting my grandparents in the village, particularly because I enjoyed travelling by train.
It was always exciting to board at Park Station and then change trains in Bloemfontein after spending the whole night being lulled to sleep by the grinding rhythm of the wheels on iron, or to stand in the corridor looking out at the telephone poles passing very fast. If we were lucky we - my mother, my twin brothers Sonwabo and Monwabisi, my sister Thami, and my baby brother Zwelakhe - would have our own compartment with four berths, like bunk-beds.
The greatest joy came from eating umphako - provisions for the road - of chicken and steamed bread carried in a cane and wicker basket. Sometimes we shared the compartment with another family, in which case we would share our respective umphako.
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Invariably they would also be carrying chicken and steamed bread in a similar basket. From Bloemfontein the train took us to Zastron, where we would catch a bus to Sterkspruit, and then take our trusty Dumakude Bus Service right to the doorstep of my grandparents' ixande. But on this occasion of banishment the two-day train journey was a very unhappy one. I was leaving my friends in Johannesburg, and I wondered how I would cope in a village. He was at the counter buying fish and chips for our lunch and I was standing next to him.
A mad woman in dirty tattered clothes approached me, smiling. She really scared me, so I moved to the other side of my father. But he thought I was afraid of a white boy, about my age, who had also approached the counter at the same time.
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He reprimanded me right there in public for giving way to the boy just because he was white and lectured me on how I was just as good as the boy and had no business to be afraid of white people. I just stood there feeling small; I dared not defend myself by saying that I was escaping the mad black woman and not the white boy. When I came to live here grandfather had already lost some of his marbles, after an assassination attempt by a man called Gazi who stabbed him in the head with a knife. Apparently Gazi had been unhappy about one thing or another in grandfather's administration.
After the stabbing Charles was no longer the grandfather I remembered on earlier visits, years before. The grandfather who sat in the shade of a gigantic boulder across the gravel road surrounded by his councillors, settling community disputes; who rode his horse Gobongwana, while singing its praises; who sat at his iron sewing machine making leather shoes while still singing praises to Gobongwana we were proud that he was not just a cobbler who fixed soles like the old man on the veranda of Cretchley's store; he created shoes right from scratch ; who stood in front of ixande in his brown riding breeches and gave sweets to a queue of grandchildren whenever he came from meetings in Sterkspruit; who never forgot to give a brief caress to his twenty-year-old dog Ngqawa, as it slept at the door; and who regaled us with stories of our revered ancestor Mhlontlo.
According to him, our clan, the amaMpondomise people, originally came from Qumbu in the eastern part of the Cape Province - the region that was named Transkei by subsequent colonial governments. Then one day Mhlontlo, who was a paramount chief in that area, killed the British resident magistrate.
It happened in , the very year my grandfather was born. First, Mhlontlo invited the magistrate to a ceremony at Sulenkama, the seat of the amaMpondomise kingdom. The magistrate, a violent and arrogant man called Hamilton Hope, set off with much pomp, thinking that he was going to be the centre of the ceremony, only to discover too late that the ceremony was about his own ritual murder. My ancestor, who was also a reputable medicine man, conducted the ritual in which parts of Hope's body were to be used as medicine to strengthen his armies.
The whole ceremony involved a theatrical performance: Mhlontlo and his people rode back to Qumbu, thirty kilometres away, took over the magistracy and improvised a play where Mhlontlo took the role of Hamilton Hope. Turning over the pages of the big book on the magistrate's bench and adopting a nasal tone in his Anglicised isiXhosa, he mimicked Hope sentencing people. Well, that theatre didn't last for long.
The British forces came to arrest Mhlontlo, but he and his followers escaped to Lesotho, where they were given refuge by Chief Moorosi of the Baphuthi clan. My grandfather was a baby on his mother's back during that long journey of nearly six hundred kilometres.
His parents and the hundreds of Mhlontlo's followers felt very safe because he had strong medicine that protected everyone. Both the British and the Boers feared him; he could make their guns spew water instead of bullets and their cannons explode in their faces. After some time a white trader lured Mhlontlo with new blankets from his Lesotho refuge to the Telle River that bordered South Africa.
He was captured by the British troops who took him back to Qumbu for trial. Grandfather never told us the details of how Mhlontlo won the case, but he did. It must have been his strong medicine at work. Many of Mhlontlo's followers decided against returning to Qumbu. That is why there are many Mdas in Lesotho today. My great-grandfather - Charles' father, that is - the Feyiya Mda who I mentioned in relation to the orchards, decided to cross the Lesotho border back to South Africa and to settle at eKra Village in the Lower Telle area.
By the time I went to live with my grandfather he could no longer remember the story of Mhlontlo. He had become a cantankerous old man who would tap a tyke's head with a walking stick for no apparent reason. We stayed out of his way. He could no longer work in his fields either. Grandmother did all the farming with the help of the other villagers in work-parties known as ilima.
But we were spoilt. We were never allowed to work in the fields like other village kids or like some of her older grandchildren. My siblings - who were already staying with my grandparents even before my banishment - and I were greatly distressed that we could not go to the fields.
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Ilima was so much fun - with food, songs and dances. Once we went with people who were taking food to the workers, but grandmother shooed us away. We took this as a punishment for being my father's children.