The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

Author:Henning Mankell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2011-08-22T22:00:00+00:00

Miranda Nkoyi contemplated her daughter. She was sitting on the floor, staring into space. Miranda could see her eyes were not vacant, but alert. Whenever she looked at her daughter, she sometimes felt, as if in a brief fit of giddiness, that she was seeing her mother. Her mother was as young as that, barely seventeen years old, when she gave birth to Miranda. Now her own daughter was that same age.

What is she looking at, Miranda wondered. She sometimes felt a cold shudder running down her spine when she recognized features characteristic of Matilda’s father. Especially that look of intense concentration, even though she was staring into empty space. That inner vision that no one else could understand.

“Matilda,” she said tenderly, as if hoping to bring her back down to earth by treating her gently.

The girl came out of her reverie with a start, and looked her straight in the eye.

“I know my father will soon be here,” she said. “As you won’t let me hate him while he’s here, I do it while I’m waiting. You can dictate when. But you can never take the hatred away from me.”

Miranda wanted to cry out that she understood her feelings. She often thought that way herself. But she could not. She was like her mother, Matilda senior, who was saddened by the continual humiliation of not being permitted to lead a satisfactory life in her own country. Miranda knew she had grown soft just like her mother, and remained silently in a state of impotence she could only make up for by constantly betraying the man who was the father of her daughter.

Soon, she thought. Soon I must tell my daughter that her mother has retained a little bit of her life force, despite everything. I shall have to tell her, in order to win her back, to show how the gap between us is not an abyss after all.

In secret, Matilda was a member of the ANC youth organization. She was active, and had already undertaken several undercover assignments. She had been arrested by the police on more than one occasion. Miranda was always frightened she would be injured or killed. Every time the coffins of dead blacks were being carried in swaying, chanting processions to their graves, she would pray to all the gods she believed in that her daughter might be spared. She turned to the Christian god, to the spirits of her ancestors, to her dead mother, to the songoma her father always used to talk about. But she was never completely convinced they had really heard her. The prayers merely made her feel better by dint of tiring her out.

Miranda could understand the confused feeling of impotence in her daughter because her father was a Boer, knowing herself to be sired by the enemy. It was like being inflicted with a mortal wound at the very moment of birth.

Nevertheless, she knew a mother could never regret the existence of her own daughter. That time seventeen years ago she had loved Jan Kleyn just as little as she loved him today.

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