The History of Man

By Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

With the lightest of touches, a cast of unforgettable characters, and moments of surreal beauty, The History of Man sketches decades of history in this unnamed Southern African nation, examining the interior world of a consummate colonizer. A book for people interested in the epics that tell contested histories of colonized countries in Africa. For people who loved Kintu, We Need New Names, and the classic Things Fall Apart. It explains the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of a multiethnic country with a history of subjugation, political and social segregation, and a violent uprising to restore liberation and democracy to the country's citizens who have long been denied their rights. The History of Man is the second in Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s highly acclaimed book series centered on an unnamed Southern African country, but a standalone novel in its own right with new characters and themes. Written by an African woman from the point of view of a white male colonizer, but told with empathy, generosity, and melodic prose, this novel merges two worlds and fosters compassion and a sense of common humanity on a topic often wrought with great resentment and historical trauma. Identifying Emil’s privilege and mistakes, but also his good intentions, The History of Man simultaneous condemns and shows understanding for the actions of the colonizer, allowing readers to seek out their own prejudices and privileges, our good intentions and false ones. An evocative, gentle, yet penetrating novel that will make an excellent buy for readers hungry for accessible, multi-faceted African literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Catalyst Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781946395610

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a writer, filmmaker and academic who holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, as well as master’s degrees in African Studies and Film. She has published research on Saartjie Baartman and she wrote, directed and edited the award-winning short film Graffiti. Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, she worked as a teacher in Johannesburg before returning to Bulawayo. Her first novel, The Theory of Flight won the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in South Africa. In 2022, Siphiwe was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

When news of the cease-fire arrived, on December 21, 1979, Emil Coetzee was washing blood off his hands. He watched the rust-colored water slosh up until it almost filled the white enamel basin and then he turned off the coldwater tap. It did not turn off entirely and water kept drip, drip, dripping into the basin, as though holding on to a memory. The water gurgled down the drain until it was a disappearing swirl. Next, Emil reached for the black plug that was, by some miracle, still attached to the sink. He pulled the plug up by its metal chain and pushed it in before turning on the hot-water tap and letting the scalding water rise halfway up the basin. Without having to look, he reached for the bottle of antiseptic liquid that was under the sink. As advertised, when he poured a capful of the liquid into the water it mushroomed into a cloud of purity. He submerged his hands into the water and his broken skin was thankful for all the many stings it felt. Emil was no Pontius Pilate, however, and so, next, he scrubbed his hands with a bar of lye soap until they were raw and red. As he dried them on the once-white cloth in the towel dispenser, he decided that this was to be his last day at the Organization of Domestic Affairs.

As always, he ignored the rarely used purple pump bottle of lavender-scented lanolin lotion that was stationed between the two taps. He had always felt that whoever had left it on the sink had meant it as a cruel joke. This was definitely not the place for sweet-smelling things.

Before he left the room, Emil peered at his reflection in the tarnished mirror above the water basin; his glance was brief as it always was now, and for the first time he noticed how tired he looked. He was weary, more weary of the world than any man in his fifties ought to be. After the bombastic hubris of youth and the blundering determination of adulthood, there was supposed to be blissful self-assuredness, was there not? Or was that self-assuredness only reserved for a particular kind of man, a man that he had not become?

He looked into his eyes to see what they carried within them. Nothing. Even on a day such as this, his eyes stared back blankly as though long unseeing.

Emil took one last look at the dark, gray, concrete room with its naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling and bathed the room and its rudimentary furniture in a cold welcome. It was not much to gaze upon, to be sure, but this had been the crucible of his manhood. Emil tried to reconcile himself to this fact before he switched off the light and closed the door firmly behind him, shutting out the sound of the drip, drip, dripping tap.

Instead of taking the six flights of stairs to his office, he chose to take the elevator. He often avoided the lift and its proximity-induced forced camaraderie. However, with news of the cease-fire, he felt that the atmosphere in the lift would be somber and subdued enough to allow people to take complete notice of one another. Emil suddenly had the perverse desire to be seen—really seen. He wanted, just this once, for others to notice the oil-colored stains on his veldskoene and know, not just suspect, what he had been up to all these years.

When he entered the lift there were, in addition to the lift operator, two elderly ladies who were all rosewater and talcum powder, a tall man in a baby-blue safari suit and a brunette with red-wine lipstick and Farrah Fawcetted hair.Emil’s supposition had been correct: the lift was filled with a stunned and solemn silence. The silence let Emil know that he was not alone—that he was not the only one who all of a sudden felt as if he was…hanging in the balance. The war had given them everything: an identity, a purpose, a state. It had made them feel a sense of belonging that had previously eluded them. The cease-fire had taken all that away and had done so without any hesitation.

Emil knew all the people in the lift. The two elderly ladies, Prudence and Prunella Pickford, were the spinster aunts of an ever-jolly man, Lars Pickford, who worked in the Processing department on the third floor; the man in the safari suit was Samuel Levi, who worked in the Accounts department on the fifth floor; the brunette, Cecelia Chatsworth, was engaged, perhaps even recently married, judging by the ring on her finger, to Claude McCloud, who worked in the Computer department on the second floor. Emil knew some of their histories: Prudence and Prunella had raised Lars since his parents had died in a road accident when he was a baby. They brought him freshly baked goods every day for his ten o’clock tea; Samuel Levi, who only wore pastel-colored polyester safari suits, had a penchant for being rather creative with the books and had been fired twice before being hired by The organization of Domestic affairs for this particular talent; Cecelia Chatsworth, or Mrs. Claude McCloud, as it were, believed that the country was surely going to the dogs and had recently resigned from her job as a teller at the cabs bank and now spent her time putting pressure on Claude to emigrate to South Africa.

Emil realized that the invitation to the McCloud wedding was probably lost in the pile of letters and correspondence that he had not bothered to open since Kuki had left him. She had always been the one to handle their considerably full social calendar and to arrange their very busy lives. Everyone in the lift, even the operator, knew that he and Kuki were separated; the City of Kings size made it extremely difficult not to know your neighbor and his business. Feeling justifiably snubbed, Mrs. Claude McCloud was making a point of not catching Emil’s eye. She, unfortunately, made the mistake of looking at his feet. Before she could stop herself, her eyes flew up at Emil’s as she hastily got off on the second floor. He had expected his blood-stained shoes to elicit looks of horror, but Mrs. Claude McCloud had given him such a pitying glance that he found himself placing his hands in his pockets, as though to hide them.

As Emil got off on the sixth floor, he nodded stiffly to the operator who, once so acknowledged, smiled in relief. The smile made Emil try to recollect the young man’s name; he had said it several times, at Emil’s prompting, when they said good morning to each other, every morning before Emil took the stairs. The name would not come to Emil. It was one of those multisyllabic African names with more consonants than sense…a name like Sibonubuhle…no…no…no…that was not him but his tiredness talking. He managed to smile back at the operator before the doors closed, and that, at least, was something.

On this, his last day as the head of The Organization of Domestic Affairs, Emil Coetzee entered his office and went to sit behind his desk. He picked up a black orb that had, embedded within it, a gorgeous multi-colored glittery twirl that created the sensation of looking into a vortex. He believed that he had received it as a present from his son, Everleigh. He could only believe this and not know it with certainty because he did not remember receiving it, but it was the sort of beautiful thing that his son would give, or, more precisely, would have given when he was younger. Emil had recently found the orb sitting on top of a forgotten pile of National Geographic magazines in his den at home and had decided to bring it to the office to use as a paperweight.

From under the paperweight that he believed, but no longer recalled with certainty, had been a gift from his son, Emil retrieved the only letter that Everleigh had ever written him. He knew the letter by heart and no longer had to physically read it, but he liked the materiality of the now flimsy and fragile paper in his hands—liked the weight, the burden of it. As Emil read the letter, he tried not to look at his hands.

You finally got your wish. You have always wanted me to kill something and now I have. I hope you are finally proud cf me. I have become the son that you have always wanted.

He always read the ending aloud and let the words fill the silence of the office.

Although his hands were trembling when he finished reading the letter, he managed to carefully fold it and place it under the paperweight that may or may not have been a present from his son.

The reading of the letter from Everleigh was the first half of his morning ritual. For the second half of his morning ritual, Emil opened the top drawer of his desk and retrieved his wallet. He allowed his hands to become still before he opened it and took out five notes written in a left-leaning cursive on azure-colored paper. He placed the notes on top of his desk, in the order they had been received:

No. 1 Pioneer Road

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth cf thought untouched by words and deeper still a guf cf formless feelings untouched by thought.

—Zora Neale Hurston

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Let’s meet. We need to talk. H&S. Friday at 2 p.m.

When God had made The Man, he made him out cf stu,jf that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions cf pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.

—Zora Neale Hurston

The man that Emil truly was existed at a point somewhere between the letter from his son and the five notes from the woman that he loved. He wished that he could pinpoint the exact spot and know himself confidently and completely. He wanted to be assured, as other men in their fifties must be, but he was not. He imagined these men beholding their reflections in mirrors and feeling something specific like contentment, confidence or resignation.

On the rare occasions that he looked at himself in the mirror, Emil never felt anything specific; his inner world was too unresolved for him to feel settled in it. All his life he had seemed only to be able to grasp at the edges of things, never to see or experience the whole, to find himself in the middle

of something that had already begun. He could have very easily been another kind of man if he had known how to be anything else but himself.

Emil’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Before he could tell whoever it was to enter, a young woman let herself into his office. She wore an army jacket, khaki shorts, a white tank top with no bra underneath it and hiking boots. A rucksack was carelessly slung over her right shoulder. It was a very calculated look that was meant to get the attention of men, Emil objectively observed.

She smiled at him and offered her hand for him to shake. One of her front teeth was discolored and Emil tried not to stare at its dull grayness as he shook her hand. He examined her entire face and noticed that she was not as young as she had at first appeared. There was a hardness about her that must have come with some of the necessary disappointments of age.

She carried with her a scent that was sickly sweet like the smell of decaying roses. The scent hung heavily in the air and soon filled the entire office.

"My name is Saskia Hargrave. I am a journalist with The Chronicle," she said, sitting herself down opposite Emil despite the fact that he had not asked her to. "I would like to write your story—a feature in The Sunday News."

That explained her aggressive behavior. She had commandeered the space around them because she meant to take charge of what came next, to corner him, to not take no for an answer.

My story? I don’t have a story, he said.

You’re Emil Coetzee the head of The Organization, she retorted as though this was news to him. Of course you have a story. You’re one of the country’s heroes.

The country must be in a truly bad state if it has a man like me for a hero.

Saskia appeared confused by this for a moment and then she blinked away her confusion. Oh…I see. Humility. A nice touch.

She reached for her rucksack and retrieved her notebook and pen. She scribbled something hurriedly and then stared at him and smiled.

Miss Hargrave, Emil said, as delicately as he could, I really do not have a story for you.

But you’re the man of the hour, she said, her smile faltering slightly.

The smell of decaying roses soon overpowered Emil. He excused himself and went to open a bay window and stand by it for a moment. He gratefully breathed in the polluted air of the City of Kings.

Emil? Saskia said. I was actually contemplating doing more than a feature…I would like to write your biography. Your life has just been so full, rich and exciting. Your story has to be told.

Emil clearly saw how it was with her. Saskia Hargrave believed that he was merely portraying false modesty and expecting to be flattered and so she was trying to flatter him. However, she was not particularly good at flattering people. Flattery was something newly acquired in her arsenal. Until recently, hubris had made her rely on the fact that she was young and attractive and could easily, therefore, invite the interest of men. She was young no longer and she was now at a loss because she had put all her power and sense of self in the most transient thing—youth.

Even so, she had been sure that she was still young and attractive enough to excite the interest of a middle-aged man, like him, who must be desperate to savor youth. That was why she had not worn a bra. She had wanted him to know, from the very first moment he saw her, that she was sexually available to him. Saskia Hargrave had been so sure that this tactic would work that she had not prepared herself for another outcome.

Emil was not a saint. The entire City of Kings knew this. Nevertheless, sinner though he was, he had long ago found the woman who would redeem him. He glanced over at the azure-colored notes on his desk and wondered how he could put them back in his wallet without bringing too much attention to them. Saskia Hargrave appeared to be a very inquisitive sort and so it was probably best for him to stay by the window and make her look at him and not the contents of his desk.

Emil, things are changing in this country…rapidly. Men like you may very well be forgotten in a year or two. You want to be remembered, don’t you?

Did he want to be remembered? There had been a time when he had wanted nothing more than to make an impact and leave his mark—to be a man of history. But now that he had succeeded in realizing his dream, he felt almost certain that he should have wanted something else of his life.

You want to be remembered, don’t you? Saskia Hargrave repeated, this time with uncertainty in her voice.

Not particularly. At least not for the things that people know me for…the big events of my life. If I am to be remembered, I want to be remembered for the quieter…truer… moments of my life. I don’t need a story for those…I need someone.

Saskia Hargrave smiled at him encouragingly, clearly misreading the situation.

Luckily for me, I already have someone who retains those moments, Emil said, walking away from the window and making his way back to his desk.

Your wife? Saskia Hargrave asked, prying in order to mask her disappointment.

Emil merely smiled in response, aware that his smile did not encourage further inquiry.

As soon as Emil sat down at his desk he noticed that one of the azure-colored notes was missing and that the folded letter was no longer under the paperweight and was now half-opened.

Did you take one of the notes on my desk? Emil asked as a courtesy. There was no other way to explain its disappearance. Miss Hargrave? Emil asked, making sure that she felt that those two words had been spoken not by the middleaged man she had been trying, unsuccessfully, to flirt with and seduce, but by Emil Coetzee, The head of the Organization of Domestic Affairs and one of the most powerful men in the country.

Saskia Hargrave tried to dissemble by smiling coquettishly as she retrieved an azure-colored piece of paper from her notebook.

It is such a pretty color…I was just admiring it…forgot it was there. I was so absorbed by our conversation.

Emil made it a point to stare at her discolored tooth as she spoke. He did so until it became clear to her that there was nothing to be gained by not leaving immediately.

Once Saskia Hargrave was gone, Emil gazed down at the note.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Emil put the note in its rightful place. He read all the notes over again and then placed them carefully, like perfect treasures, in his wallet.

He examined the half-opened letter and delicately folded it before placing it back under the paperweight.

His story, if it were ever told, would have to contain the lows of the letter and the highs of the notes. It would have to be told chronologically in a linear fashion, with a definite beginning, middle and end—none of that starting-in-the- middle-or-end modern nonsense. It would have to be told in this fashion because that was the only way to make any sense of the dark, gray, concrete room with its naked lightbulb, forever drip, drip, dripping tap and the man with blood on his hands.

PART ONE

BOYHOOD - A WALKING SHADOW

CHAPTER 1

Like most people who have truly loved, Emil Coetzee knew the exact moment that he fell in love for the first time and would remember it always. He was standing outside the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda that he called home. His back was against the wall and his eyes were surveying the vast veld—this beautiful and golden great expanse—that lay before him.

It was a windy day that promised rain and the clouds were gathering gray in anticipation of the coming downpour. He peered up at the sky in time to see the clouds part and let the sun shine through brightly. God’s visit. That was what his mother called this phenomenon. The sun had been there the entire time, hidden by the clouds. Emil marveled at this always-being-thereness of the sun and then reached his hand up to the sun as if to touch it. The sun disappeared behind the clouds again, but now Emil knew that it was there and felt comforted.

He gazed out at the veld and took in its vastness. The wild wind made the elephant grass sing and swoon before it came and kissed his face. Emil closed his eyes, placed the palms of both his hands against the whitewashed walls, took a deep breath and let the beauty of all that surrounded him enter his body. As that beauty traveled through his body, it turned into something else, and he knew that this thing that he felt in every fiber of his being, this wondrous and rarefied thing, this thing called love, was something that he would cherish all the days of his life.

Emil was six years old when he, at that moment master of all that he surveyed, beheld the veld and fell in love with it. This was to be his first concrete and complete memory. There would be other memories too, of the British South Africa Police outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills, which was where the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda that he called home was situated.

He remembered the sundowners that his parents, Johan and Gemma Coetzee, hosted every Friday evening and how his mother, in her black drop-waist dress and red cloche hat, would frenetically flap and flail the Charleston before his father joined her for a foxtrot promenade, while Emil, wrapped and rapt in admiration, happily sipped on lukewarm lime cordial.

He remembered walking into the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it, all the while knowing that he had found his true self, that this was his natural habitat. He remembered his black shadow traveling the most beautiful land ever created as he explored the environs of the Matopos Hills. It was at this site that he could find all the heroes he had learnt about in school: Cecil John Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson, Charles Coghlan, Allan Wilson and the brave members of the Shanghai Patrol. It was here at ‘World’s View’ that they were buried or memorialized. The Matopos Hills was also the place where the god of the Matabele resided and where, accordingly, they came to ask for blessings, which for them always came in the form of rain. Proud men in loincloths and regal women in beads—rain dancers—would ascend the hills, then for hours there would be the sounds of drumming, stomping, ululating and shrieking, followed by an absolute silence that came before the rain dancers would descend the hills, looking, to Emil, as he watched in wonderment, as if they were carrying the solemn-looking clouds on their heads, shoulders and backs.

But probably the most magnificent of all the things at the site were the San cave paintings that told the intricate story of the hunt, that is, the story of how man and animal moved toward and away from one another in a rhythm that became a dance of respect, honor, love and ultimately death. His father would take him to the Bambata, Nswatugi and Silozwane caves, hoist him on his broad shoulders and together they would decipher the paintings—writing, really—on the wall. The narratives were realistic and fair: sometimes man outmaneuvered animal, sometimes animal overpowered man. Emil always imagined himself to be part of the hunt; of all the things in the world, this was what he desired most, to test his might and mettle against that of an animal.

In his dreams, he was something beautifully wild and ferocious. He ran barefoot through the grasslands, carrying an assegai in his hand and knowing exactly when to strike at the heart of the dark, looming creature in his environment. He was a hero and the creature was something out of a fable. When he awoke his heart would be pounding with an excitement that made him jump out of bed and run around the small patch of land that constituted their front yard, yowling and brandishing an imagined weapon as he prepared himself to vanquish the creature of his dreams.

What Emil did not recollect of his childhood, his parents told him. According to them, he had been born, after a somewhat lengthy courtship and hasty marriage on their part, at the Sandhurst Private Hospital in Durban on 18 April 1927. Six months later he was baptized and christened Emil Coetzee. Possibly hoping to have the relationship with his son that he had not had with his father, Johan had proudly named his son Emil after his father. While this would prove to be a rather damning inheritance in many ways, none of those ways were apparent at the moment of christening.

Although his name was Afrikaans, and his father’s name, Johan Coetzee, was also Afrikaans, Emil had in fact, for all intents and purposes, been born into an English family. This was because Johan was the product of a relatively short-lived and ill-fated union between a rambling ne’er-do-well called Emil Coetzee and a dancer named Bethany Miller. When he was still in his swaddling clothes, Johan’s mother had taken him to a home for orphans, waifs and strays that was run by the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings. Her name was registered as Bethany Miller and her occupation listed as ‘dancer,’ which, as Johan grew older, he began to appreciate was a euphemism for something else entirely. Johan came to know of his father’s name and lack of righteousness because his mother had had enough time to tell the ladies of the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings both these things before leaving her newborn baby son in their care. Consequently, whenever the young Johan did anything that was construed as vaguely untoward, he was warned vehemently against becoming like his father, Emil Coetzee, and, as a result, all Johan had received from his father was his last name, Coetzee.

Bethany Miller had left Johan at the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings without so much as a final glance. This last detail Johan always added to prevent himself from feeling overly sentimental and thus romanticizing the memory of the woman who had abandoned him. It was at the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings that Johan received a very thorough and very proper English education. He later used this education to apply for a post in the British South Africa Police and soon, by his nineteenth birthday, became a traffic controller.

This was a new position and both the BSAP and the young colony were extremely proud of having need of persons to conduct their traffic, because it showed not only that the country was growing, but that it was moving forward in a civilized fashion. Whereas in the early days the city fathers had been content to allow the barely manageable melee—the ox-drawn wagons whose span dictated the width of the city’s avenues, the horse-drawn carriages driven by the affluent, the donkey-drawn scotch carts that were often unpredictable, the always-speeding Zeederberg mail and passenger coaches, the zigzagging joyous jinrickshas, the always-on- the-go Raleigh, Rover and Hercules bicycles, and the hundreds of constantly to-ing and fro-ing feet—to create its own rhyme and reason, now that that most modern invention, the automobile, was