The Tale of the Sakabula Bird

By Vincent Gray

Her story is told by her lover, an eccentric artist and Camus-eque character, who remains nameless. As an old man in the autumn of his life, he unburdens both his and Wanetta’s story to a stranger he meets by chance one night in the pub of the Masonic Hotel in Boksburg. Woven into the story is a painting of a bird called the Sakabula Bird. The painting was included in one of his youthful exhibitions and drew the attention of a young university student called Wanetta Samuelsson. The telling of the story behind the painting became the catalyst which ignited their love affair. Both were drawn into the People’s War of the 1980s in South Africa, and were subsequently detained by the notorious secret police. Under an excruciating regime of torture Wanetta’s body was plunged into that dark universe of unrelenting and bottomless pain, a universe described in Elaine Scarry’s book ‘The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World’. In her cell a stick figure scene of Golgotha had been etched into the wall by a previous detainee who died under torture. Always late at night the loud metallic clanking, clanging, smashing and crashing of heavy cell doors swinging open and closing begun. And then the night would be continuously pierced with the sounds of blood curdling screams, and just before the break of dawn the creeping sounds of silence could only once more mean the quiet wordless and voiceless whispers of death, death beneath the rising and twinkling morning star. No one knows when it will be their turn and how many times they will have to endure the journey to the torture chamber. The only exit is the door of death. Death is always comes as a welcome relief, followed by that unsettling stillness of expiration, like the condensing early morning dew while it is still dark, when the tortured body finally lies prone, naked and unmoving and unfeeling under the glare of a cold bare unfeeling light. How many times will they find themselves at the threshold of that door before they make their final exit? How times while passing through the mists of sublime pain will they wonder whether they are living or dead? What can torture, stress, trauma and anxiety do to the body? The body houses its own mysterious agents of death, silently waiting to be unleashed. How does one continue to live with death as one’s constant shadowy companion after escaping the visitation of the dark angel so many times? The dark angel could be the black Sakabula Bird floating in the bright golden sunlight over the grassy plains of the South African Highveld, plains which share the same grassy vegetative physiognomy of the US prairies, the Russian steppes and the pampas of Argentina. The story is embedded in an imaginary geography of Boksburg, a gold mining town close to Johannesburg on the so-called East Rand. The narrator is an Anglicized Afrikaner who was once a Marxist and communist struggle stalwart and now has to contend with the teasing paradoxes and ironies of an African Nationalist rent-seeking compradorial bourgeoisie who rule by corruption over a declining post-apartheid South Africa. He finds some solace in reclaiming his Afrikaner identity in the company of African political refugees. And the Sakabula Bird floats over the grassland plains of the great South African Highveld, collecting the souls of those who struggled for freedom and justice in South Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Gray
• Release date: Jun 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311191175

Vincent Gray

As a son of a miner, I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. I grew up in the East Rand mining town of Boksburg. I matriculated from Boksburg High School. After high school, I was conscripted into the South African Defence Force for compulsory national military service when I was 17 years old. After my military service, I went to the University of the Witwatersrand. After graduating with a BSc honours degree I worked for a short period for the Department of Agriculture in Potchefstroom as an agronomist. As an obligatory member of the South African Citizen Miltary Force, I was called up to do 3-month camps on the 'Border' which was the theatre of the so-called counter-insurgency 'Bush War'. In between postgraduate university studies I also worked as a wage clerk on the South African Railways and as a travelling chemical sales rep. In my career as an academic, I was a molecular biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I lectured courses in microbiology, molecular biology, biotechnology and evolutionary biology. On the research side, I was involved in genomics, and plant and microbial biotechnology. I also conducted research into the genomics of strange and weird animals known as entomopathogenic nematodes. I retired in 2019, however, I am currently an honorary professor at the University of the Witwaterand and I also work as a research writing consultant for the University of Johannesburg.