Going to the Mountain by Ndaba Mandela

Author:Ndaba Mandela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

7

Isikhuni sibuya nomkhwezeli.

“A brand burns him who stirs it up.”

Don’t get me wrong; I loved The Lion King, and for real, Mbuso and Andile could watch that DVD a hundred times in a row and sing every song word for word. Same with The Jungle Book, to a lesser extent. No disrespect, Disney. I especially like that part in The Lion King where Simba, the adolescent lion (voiced by Matthew Broderick, because all the black actors were apparently unavailable that day) seeks the advice of Rafiki, a wise old mandrill (voiced by Robert Guillaume).

“I know what I have to do,” says Simba, “but going back means I’ll have to face my past, and I’ve been running from it for so long.”

Swack! Rafiki bashes him over the head with a big stick.

“Ow!” says Simba. “Geeze! What was that for?”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Rafiki. “It’s in the past.”

Simba says, “Yeah, but it still hurts.”

“Oh, yes,” says Rafiki, “the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it.”

On one level, it’s a Disneyfied restatement of the words of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You could definitely apply this to colonialism in general and apartheid in particular. On a more personal level, I suppose it’s about the baggage we either drag through our lives or take a moment to unpack.

We didn’t spend a lot of time talking through all the feelings when I was growing up. You did what you were supposed to do, because there was always a lot of stuff going on that was way bigger than your stuff, whatever your stuff happened to be. Those years are such a minefield. I dread the day Lewanika and Neema are in that phase where they’re borrowing my car and telling me off and seriously imagining that they know everything, but I know that if they don’t go through that, there’s something wrong with them. All I can do is take that ride with them and try to remember that a lot of people cut me a lot of slack back when I was in that phase.

My dad lived nearby, but at first, I didn’t see him very often. My mom was still somewhat adrift, still struggling with substance abuse and personal issues. As I got older, I started processing all the things that I’d seen and heard when I was little—stuff I’d never really processed because I was too young to understand what was happening—and it was like rebreaking a bone that hasn’t mended properly. This is the problem with a culture in which children aren’t allowed to ask questions. Eventually they grow up and discover they don’t have any answers.

Madiba was aware of (if not exactly sensitive to) the challenges and changes I was going through as a teenager, and he made an effort to help me through it. As I got older, he invited me to travel with him more often, and there was a bit of a learning curve there.

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