Ten years ago, I helped a handful of men take my little brother’s life. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I told Luthando where to find them. Earlier that year, my brother and I had made a pact to combine our initiation ceremonies.
This was back in 1993.
LT was only seventeen then. He was broad of shoulder, but known as a wimp at Ngangelizwe High. My brother was good looking in a funny way that never helped him any, and, like me, he was often called ibhari, or useless, by the older guys in the neighbourhood. LT was bad with girls, too; most of them had decided on us pretty early. It’s strange that I remember that about him most of all. I suppose Luthando was handed the lousy luck of every guy in our family except our dad, who’d thrown us into different wombs one year after the other. We had cousins like that, too, all of them dealt a similar hand. In the end, it was winter when Luthando went to the hills to set things straight for himself. He went up thinking I would follow up behind him.
It was raining when the bakkie took him on its back and drove him up the dirt trail. Inside the camp, they put him in line with a set of boys he shared a classroom with at school. Then they took out their blades. Afterwards, they nursed him for a week, and he kicked and swore at them for another two. They called him the screamer, they told us later, when we gathered to put him inside the earth. Maybe it was meant with tenderness, I thought, the kind of tenderness men could keep between themselves up in the hills.
One morning, they said, my brother had failed to make the sounds they’d come to know him for. Luthando wasn’t due out for another two days. The sky had been an empty blue expanse, easy on their duties around uziko, and they’d missed his peculiar fussiness. When they walked into his hut, one after the other, they found a memory instead of the man they were out to make. That was my little brother in there, dead at seventeen. And I’ve never forgotten it was me who put you there, LT.
The Reactive is published by Umuzi. Read our interview with Masande Ntshanga here.
AERODROME 