I Wish I Knew My Mentor

By Percy P Makhuba

From a rising voice in post-Apartheid literature comes I Wish I Knew My Mentor, the second novel by Percy Makhuba, author of Cries of the Forgotten.
In 1935 as Johannesburg is expanding into the major metropolitan city of South Africa, Mandla Sithole, a young Zulu workman on a crew building Johannesburg’s historic underground postal tunnels comes across a book hidden amongst the stones. On the first page is a stark warning for anyone underground to leave immediately. Alarmed for his safety and that of his fellow workers, Mandla, is forced to put aside ethnic rivalries and accept the help of Qhawe Nondela, an odd but courteous Xhosa co-worker, to smuggle the book out of the work site and begin reading it on the sly. Within its covers is a story that not only explains in great depth the events leading up to the reason for the author’s warning, but one which also changes the course of Mandla’s life forever.
Against the backdrop of burgeoning Apartheid and ethnic rivalries, Percy Makhuba presents a world in which the lines between the living and the dead are blurred by the common restlessness of being human and where not only the exploitation of native African lands by the monumentally ambitious Boer population scars the lives of all in their path, but the Earth herself secretly nurses her pain and passes judgment on those who cut into her belly.
I Wish I Knew My Mentor takes to task the greed and ambition that led to Apartheid, one of the world’s darkest examples of human beings’ capacity for cruelty and yet also celebrates the possibilities within the human heart and spirit of the emotional transformation of hatred into a force for inner strength and real, abiding social change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Percy P Makhuba
• Release date: Jul 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463283196

Percy P Makhuba

Percy Makhuba was born on 18 June 1967 in Honeydew, South Africa. He grew up living on a farm and attended school at Paradise bend School and Witkoppen High School. Percy studied transport management at Rand Afrikaans University qualifying in 2002. He founded a church in 2008 and is currently a Visionary Leader and a Senior Pastor of Percy Healing Word Ministry.Radical,Revolutionary,Innovative,Anointed and cutting Edge are some of the words that describer Me.

Book preview

I WISH I KNEW MY MENTOR

Percy Makhuba

Copyright © 2018 Percy Makhuba

All rights reserved.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter One

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1935

Mandla Sithole had learned early in life the bitterness of hatred. He tasted the emotion’s rancid flavor on rising in the morning, was aware of its constant company in his physical and mental movements throughout the day, and heard it whisper in his ear upon lying down to sleep each night. He had grown to know hatred so well, he understood some of its subtleties, its nuances of manifestation, right down to the smallest detail such as his utter teeth-clenching irritation over the way the whites rolled their r’s when they spoke, as if unfurling an invisible carpet over the land and everyone else in it to accompany their noxious presence in his land. The way they referred to themselves as Afrikaners, as if they’d always been there and their dominion was a matter of well-deserved course. Mandla even hated the appearance of sweat on their pale skin which was the color of pig flesh, as well as the ever-present tone of superiority that came with their conviction that native Africans were not human beings.

If not for his mother’s voice in his head, reminding him not to become like them as she had done all the twenty-six years of his life since giving birth to him, he might have actually murdered one of them by now. God knew, he had his chance everyday, working with either a shovel or a pickaxe in his hands, a strong body, sinewy from constant banging and digging into the rocky earth, and a white overseer within reach, constantly barking orders in that disgusting rolled r accent that made him grip the handle ever tighter in an effort to control himself. Were he to sink his tool into the Afrikaner’s chest, his own fate would certainly be to swing at the end of a rope, and all that would have resulted from his bitter hate was his death and his mother’s inconsolable grief to her dying day. He couldn’t do that to her, so he lived with his hate, bearing it silently, for his mother’s sake. He owed her that much, at the very least.

"Rrrrememberr, the pig was shouting right now over the rows of men swinging pickaxes and lifting shovelfuls of earth in silence, the generrrrous rrreward for finding and turrrning in any artifacts that might have been left behind by earrrly settlerrrrs." Mandla ground his teeth against the obvious lie. There was no such thing as a generous reward from one of them. Something else was going on. The whites were looking for something and using the workers to find it.

There had been some speculation at night, in the saloon of the Zulu section in the encampment that was fast forming into a township, made of the workers who’d been hired to transform some tunnels they’d been told were old mine shafts into underground postal tunnels to help get the tons of mail leaving South Africa as quickly as possible to the train that would take it to the ships at Cape Town. Someone thought maybe there were skeletons of white Boers who’d been murdered by the Zulus, their entrails stolen by the sangomas for their medicines. That possibility had been summarily dismissed. No one could imagine white entrails being of any use in the process of healing.

Mandla himself wondered silently about it without offering up his questions publicly. For a mine shaft, the underground corridors were incredibly smooth and finely formed, as if they had been actual corridors. Mine shafts consisted mainly of a wide thoroughfare in the middle for the carts laden with gold ore to come in and out while the workers on either side dug and blasted into the earth. Besides, he had grown up on the outskirts of one of the mining posts and was well familiar with the crescent-shaped pattern of the Witwatersrand, the territory that contained the veins of gold that touched off the Gold Rush of 1886. The tunnel in which they were working was well outside that area.

Why Mandla did not voice his thoughts to the others he wasn’t sure. None of them believed the whites’ story anyway. He could only ascribe his silence to his own taciturn nature. He was accustomed to not being seen or heard and had grown to prefer living behind that cloak of invisibility for fear the demon simmering inside himself be unleashed to grievous consequences.

So while no plausible explanation could be conjured over the workers’ tin cups of swill, there was one thing everyone knew, a tacit agreement signed by the common blood that coursed through their work-worn bodies: whatever was found would remain hidden to the best of their abilities, generrrous rrrewarrrd or not. At least among their fellow Zulus. They couldn’t speak for the Xhosa workers. They were not to be trusted, the opportunists they were, always ready to ingratiate themselves to the whites by learning their ways and language and by dressing like them so willingly.

So when Mandla’s pickaxe loosened a particularly large crumble of rock and the dim lighting from the lantern hung from a rafter revealed a dark corner of something, Mandla pretended not to have seen anything out of the ordinary and continued to chip away. He glanced at the co-worker next to him, suspicious. He didn’t know the man’s name, but knew by the reddish brown hue of his skin, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and pointed chin, he was Xhosa. Nearly as much to be mistrusted as the whites for their weakness, the way they buckled under so quickly and learned the white ways. How Mandla wished the man next to him had been Zulu. A Zulu would have understood. Would have helped him. An ally.

He forced himself to keep digging while he considered how he would conceal what he was unearthing. Though he didn’t know, conceal it he would. The Xhosa grunting and sweating away next to him didn’t seem to notice, but after a few minutes when their eyes met, Mandla knew his co-worker had seen it. An eerie chill ran through Mandla’s work-sweating body. He continued to dig, observing the Xhosa peripherally, ready to do what he had to if it came to that. After a few moments, he was able to surmise that the Xhosa was acting ignorant, the same as he. With the exception of the Xhosa’s odd tendency to press his hand to the wall every so often or stop his work and stare all around him for a few seconds at regular intervals, he was quiet and worked hard. Perhaps the other man meant to grab it from him at first chance. In the meantime, the object in question was emerging and the risk of others noticing it, greater.

A small wooden box was wedged into the rock, which explained the larger chunks of rubble that had fallen away. The spot in which they were working had obviously once contained an open space and not sheer wall. In one smooth movement, Mandla bent over, and with a quick check over his shoulder that the overseer was not immediately nearby, yanked. He glanced again at the Xhosa who continued his shoveling of stone piles into the waiting cart. The little box fell free of its stone prison. Mandla pried the box open, revealing a battered book of some sort, its leather cover tied with twine. There wasn’t much time. Mandla grabbed it and stuffed it into his pants. Thankfully, the object was small enough to nestle within his underclothing without bulging suspiciously. With his pickaxe, he chopped up the box, pretending to be working at the wall. When he was finished, the man next to him scooped up the remains and shoveled them into the waiting waste-collecting rail car, along with the rubble and dust to be carted out and dumped on the fringes of Joburg.

Mandla spent the rest of the day wondering at his coworker. They were staying in the same camp and Mandla worried the man would tell his other Xhosa in the encampment of the find and they would come after him to steal it in an attempt to get the rrrreewarrrd from the umulungu.

When the whistle blew at the end of the work day, Mandla ceased hacking at the rock wall and filed out with all the others. He turned in his tool and began the slow steady queue out of the underground tunnel into the blocked off open area outside where another white overseer, flanked by company security guards checked each man for anything he might have found and would attempt to smuggle out.

Mandla’s heart lurched and he forced himself not to check the security of the little book in his clothing, so as not to bring attention to himself. The whites were waiting to inspect his clothing on one side, and the Xhosa next to him knew his secret and could rat on him at any moment. If he’d believed in the