Mbali’s Story Is My Story

By Ziphozakhe Hlobo

She sits on a chair inside a hall surrounded by her friends and wipes away tears with a small white tissue.

She gasps for air and her words are formed slowly with a shaky voice.

Sitting beside her, I begin to travel the avenues of her soul, and each word is a pain to my heart.

This is Nkosi’s Haven, an orphanage.

When one enters at the beginning of the day, the kids sometimes race to give you a hug that says “Good morning!” But the next day you might say, “Good morning,” and their eyes would reply, “What’s so good about it?”

Most of the children are dealing with immense pain.

These kids remind me of myself. Their excitement, the time it takes to get them to listen, their rebellion and their prurience. Quite often, they walk back and forth next to any face that does not look familiar. Their eyes widen, and they whisper, “Who’s he?”

But, if they get silly in front of the guests, Gail Johnson, founder of the Haven, gives a look that says, “Stop it or else …”

The Haven was founded in 1999, two years before Johnson’s adopted son, Nkosi Johnson, died of AIDS at age 13. She named the Haven after him, and it became a home for mothers and children infected and affected by AIDS. The kids have taken after Nkosi, who, despite his frailty, stood in front of masses at an AIDS conference and said, “Hi, my name is Nkosi Johnson. … I have full blown AIDS.”

It is the first day of class, the kids are gathered in a hall learning a song, and I join the rhythm of the words written on a blue page posted on the wall. “And your story is my story, and I am not alone. …”

Later that day, after wrapping up class, some of the kids remain with us. One of them asks me, “Are you Xhosa ?”

I look at her, smile and confirm that I am, and she tells me that her mother’s side of her family has some Xhosa people. “My name is Mbali.”

“But that’s a Zulu name. Your name should be Nontyatyambo.”

“I don’t like that Xhosa translation of my name,” she says, mocking the ferocious sounds and clicks of my language, and then mimics how Xhosa people always sound angry when speaking.

The other girls in the room join the conversation. They ask me to teach them the three Xhosa clicks, but Mbali is the only one who is able to pronounce them perfectly.

A few days later, the laughter I shared with Mbali is replaced by tears of a child who lost her mother to AIDS a few months earlier. Her words recite a child’s wish for a mother’s love — a mother’s hug.

Her words are a pain to my heart.

Brave enough to tell it, Mbali wants this story to be her performance piece for the final day of the camp, and I help her rehearse.

Each time she tells it, I am astounded by how much I begin to remember from my own experience.

I am reluctant to give in to these countless memories.

The last time I cried the way Mbali was crying was when I called my mother’s work place.

“Hello, may I speak to Nikiwe please?”

There was a deep sigh on the other end of the line.

Then Tania Bounce, my mother’s madam, finally said, “Nikiwe? She was involved in a car accident last week and died. Did you not hear about it?”

My father said she was hit by a car and died a few hours later. My sister said they had to burn the clothes she had been wearing because they were a pool of blood. The doctors said she suffered severe brain injury. If she had lived, she would have been just an object. The police did not have much to report because it was a hit and run accident.

At the visitation, the elders told me to look at the body in the coffin.

When I did, I did not recognize Mother.

Sitting on a piece of chair made from wood, hair extensions tied to the back, Mbali looks at the book she will be reading as she begins her story.

Her entire extended family turned against her immediate family when her mother became ill. So she, her sister and her mother moved to the Haven.

When her mother died, few people attended the funeral.

“The worst thing is that people are now talking bad things about my mother because she had AIDS. They are even saying that she is the one who killed my father.”

I recall how my father often bluntly criticized my mother after her death.

Mbali is not telling her story for people to feel sorry for her.

“People think that I am looking for attention, but they don’t know how I really feel.”

I recall the faces of the people at my mother’s funeral. They were looking at us — four poor, sad kids thinking exactly what we were thinking: “What will happen to us?”

Fourteen-year-old Mbali will never forget being told, “Your mother is no longer living in the world that we are living in.”

With time I thought I would heal, but I soon learned that the pain of a

Photo by Chris Allen

Photo by Chris Allen

loss is enduring. It is physical pain that hits my neck veins, and tightens the muscles of my back, making my knees ache and numbing the tips of my toes.

I let the tears run down my cheeks.

With each word she says, I miss my mother.

I miss her warm genuine smile, which lit her beautiful light brown face, and small brown eyes. I miss her “young girl” tales about being reprimanded by so-and-so’s mother for standing with a boy on the road on her way to fetch water from the river.

When she finished telling these stories, she would go to the kitchen and start cooking while Father would narrate hilarious stories about being a village boy and going to Johannesburg, where he always got mugged because he was not “street wise” and his village upbringing came through his voice and was written all over his face.

The four of us would circle around him, our faces changing with every exaggerated gesture, and we giggled loudly when he finished each story as if we had just heard it for the first time.

“Tell that one about being robbed in the casino!” my mother would shout from the kitchen, and the four of us would wrestle our way to the kitchen only to realize she had not just said, “Food is ready!”

I miss my visits to see her in Cape Town. I miss the feeling I used to get when mother’s petite silhouette appeared on the horizon as the sun was preparing to set.

At the end of each day, whether she had been delayed by a bus, lost track of time while chattering with a friend or visited a sick relative, she would always would find her way back home.

When she took me to the bus station in Port Elizabeth the last time, she sat quietly beside me, listening to my heart’s words.

I did not want to leave her, but she took my hand, walked me to the bus, kissed me, smiled and said “See you this time next year.”

Immediately I stopped crying.

I knew I would see her again.

The confidence with which she had walked away convinced me that she would never break that promise.

But little did she know that on a rainy winter day she would be hit by a speeding car.

Today, out of my deepest pain, across the purest bits of my heart, when I long to see her face again, I remember Mbali’s bravery, and I find myself singing, “And your story is my story, and I am not alone.”

IsiXhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa. One of the most distinctive features of the language is the prominence of click consonants; the word “Xhosa” begins with a click.