My Traitor's Heart by Malan Rian

Author:Malan, Rian [Malan, Rian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

After their expulsion, Sonamuzi and Musa wandered the hills of Zululand, homeless and unwanted. It is said that they settled briefly in the Zulu capital of Mlhabatini, but their secret was discovered and they were driven out. The same thing happened in Nkandla, in Mtunzini, and in Umfolozi, according to various accounts. Musa gave birth to a second son, who was named Amon, and a third, who was named Jonas. She and Sonamuzi became Christians and took Christian names, perhaps hoping that the white man’s God would be sufficiently powerful to protect them from the shades. That He may have been, but the God of the Christians could not protect them from living Zulus. They were still unwelcome everywhere. “Until the day he died,” I was told, “Sonamuzi never built a house. Till he died, he wandered.”

Bhaleni, meanwhile, had become deranged by the knowledge of his daughter’s sin, and the terrible fury it was surely causing in the spirit world. He must have been mad, I was told, or he would never have done what he did. In his agony, Bhaleni somehow convinced himself that his beloved Musa had been married according to the law. Under Zulu law, the father of the bride receives a bride-price in cattle from the father of the groom. So Bhaleni summoned his brother, his own brother, father of Sonamuzi, and insisted that he pay sixteen cattle for Musa’s hand in marriage. To the Zulus, this was not merely wrong, it was insane. A man could not buy his brother’s daughter as a bride for his son. It violated every law, every tenet of Zulu religion. It was yet another terrible affront to the shades.

And yet the transaction took place, and Bhaleni got his sixteen cattle. Nobody else would touch the beasts, for they were said to be tainted, so he ate them all himself. It is said that Bhaleni realized as he lay dying that he, too, had committed a terrible sin, a sin that doomed his entire house. On his deathbed, the man who once murdered a Zulu convert gave his own soul to Jesus in the hope of passing on to the Christian heaven rather than to the Zulu spirit realm. It is said that Bhaleni was afraid to face the shades of his noble forebears—of brave Gawozi and ferocious Silwane. In the spirit world, a man who had sold his daughter to his own brother would endure unimaginable torments.

Many years after Bhaleni’s death, Sonamuzi, Musa, and their sons returned to the hills near Bus Stop Four. By then, all the tribe’s elders were dead, and Sonamuzi hoped his sin had been forgotten. It hadn’t. “That man was an abomination all his life,” I was told. “The people would just look at him and not know what to do. If they’d had the power and strength, they would have chased him away, or killed him, but they could not do that anymore. A brother and sister living together? Nobody accepted it. But what could we do?”

They could only wait for the shades.

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