The Sculptors of Mapungubwe by Zakes Mda

Author:Zakes Mda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ways of Dying, Black Diamond, The Madonna of Excelsior, The Heart of Redness, She Plays with Darkness, The Whale Caller, Amstel Playwright of the Year Award 1978, Amstel Playwright of the Year Award 1979, M-Net Book Prize 1997, Commonwealth Writers Prize 2001, Sunday Times Fiction Prize 2001, Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda, Zanemvula Mda, Fiction, South African fiction, Literary fiction, Mythical fiction, Family saga, Chata, Rendani
Publisher: Kwela
Published: 2013-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

RENDANI AVENGED HIMSELF BY bestowing a national honour on Chata. He didn’t do it immediately after his betrothal to Marubini was abrogated by the King. It took him two whole seasons to hatch the plot while at the same time smarting over Chata’s victory.

Various Mapungubweans had proffered their own speculations about the King’s unprecedented action. Marubini, for instance, thought it was due to her throwing a tantrum before her parents on the eve of the dzekiso and announcing to all present that she was not going to marry Rendani and if anybody forced her to she would rather kill herself. That display of bad manners had enraged her kin. She had got completely out of hand, they said, and needed a thorough lashing by her father. It would instil some respect for her elders and their sacred traditions into her flighty head. “They call her a rain dancer,” said one uncle. “It has completely gone to her head and messed up a child who used to be so respectful.” The mother had assured the gathered relatives that there was nothing to worry about; their daughter was merely having last-moment jitters. Soon she would come to her senses and would happily marry the nobleman and the whole family would be joyful and exalted by it. But the father knew his headstrong daughter better. She was as stubborn as the hills that were unmoved even by the strongest of storms, and there was only one medicine for that. The switch.

While the father went to get a good and supple one from a tree a few steps from the compound Marubini had dashed out of the door and escaped. Ma Chirikure had seen her running away from the neighbourhood and had stopped her in her tracks. She invited her into her house where she gave her succour after hearing her story.

“You’ll stay here until we can figure out what to do,” she had said. “In the meantime don’t venture out at all, not even to relieve yourself.”

Marubini had done all her business in the house and poor Ma Chirikure had to dump the result in the gullies under cover of darkness. She had not told Chata of her secret guest because she knew that once transferred to a third party a secret was no longer a secret. It was only after five days that Ma Chirikure had returned home to tell Marubini of the rumours that were doing the rounds in the town: her betrothal had been cancelled. No one had advanced any reason for the cancellation. Marubini had therefore assumed it had something to do with her spirited resistance. Had she not run away from home, she believed, she would have been a resident of Rendani’s compound by then.

The neighbourhood, on the other hand, had variously attributed the cancellation to the witchcraft of Chido’s grandmother, Marubini’s supposed big-headedness ever since people praised her for being the kind of dancer who made rain fall, the notion that she would be a disgrace

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