Vusi. Vusi Thembekwayo

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СКАЧАТЬ he became famous for his ability to kill a bull with a single blow, a feat that earned him the nickname of Kami no te: the Hand of God.

      Like my father, I have a black belt in Kyokushin, and the lesson I have learnt, the maxim that has stayed with me, is show your best at your worst. Follow through. Make the blows land. Carry on fighting, even when you are wounded and tired.

      My father was a fighter. He left school with nothing more than a Junior Certificate, what used to be called a Standard Six. His father, my grandfather, who ran a small spaza shop and shebeen, believed that was enough schooling to make him a man. My father grew up in a house with ten siblings. He was expected to go out and work. He found a job in a Kwikot factory, working on the production line, moulding metal into heat pumps and geysers. After work, he would go to the dojo, and then, when his father thought he was hanging out with friends, he would go to night school at St Anthony’s Education Centre in Boksburg to study for his matric. It was the opposite of playing hooky.

      He got his Senior Certificate, and a better job at General Electric, where he was granted the power to peer deep into the souls of his fellow workers and learn the secrets of their worth. He was a payroll clerk but he knew he was worth more than that, so there came a time – I was still very young – when he left his job and did what I would one day aspire to do as well: he became an entrepreneur. I never found out the nature of the business he started, but I do know that it was a disaster. We romanticise failure in the lore of the entrepreneur, as if it is a test of strength, a trial by combat, a valley of darkness that must be crossed on the pathway to the promised land. ‘Fail again. Fail better!’ we say, quoting Samuel Beckett. Or Thomas Alva Edison, who said that he had not failed 10 000 times, he had just found 10 000 ways that did not work. But the truth is, there is no romance in failure. All the more so when you have mouths to feed, when you are already living a life of struggle, when you have given up your steady job to chase a dream, only to watch it slowly crashing to the ground.

      I remember sitting at home, watching my father reading the newspaper, with a pen in his hand, making red circles on pages dense with type. It was only much later that I realised he was looking for a job in the classified ads. He had bonded our house to start his business, and one of the things he bought was a Nissan Skyline, a shining symbol, perhaps, of his belief that the sky was the limit to what he could achieve. He couldn’t keep up the payments, so the bank took the car. Then they wanted the house too. But my dad had a boss who wouldn’t let the sheriff in. He was called Boss, his massive German shepherd, who would bark and show his fangs whenever the officer of the law arrived at the gate, papers in hand. As a safety measure, Mom sent us to live with our grandmother. We were a house divided. My father, the protector, the provider, with his big, strong hands, was now, in effect, an exile from his own family. My mother forbade us to see him, but we would sneak across to visit on the way home from school.

      Then, one day, my grandmother turned 60. We had a party at her house, and of course, my dad was invited. It was good to see him. He looked happy. I was thirteen and eager to show him some of the moves I’d been practising – the kicks, strikes, and blocks that make up the ritual of the kata, the physical and spiritual lexicon of karate. He wasn’t just my father. He was my Sensei, my teacher. We ate lunch, we sang ‘Happy Birthday’, we cut the cake. Then, because it had been a good party, the liquor ran out. My father offered to walk to the local tavern and pick some up. I knew his real motive. Even at the age of 41, he didn’t want to be seen smoking in front of his mother. She disapproved of his habit. So did he, to tell the truth, but out in the street, he could light up and puff away without feeling too bad about it.

      My father was a walk-and-talk kind of guy. A simple stroll to the shop could take him half the day, because he would stop and talk to people he knew, and stop and talk to people he didn’t know, and wave at neighbours and at people in passing taxis. He wasn’t famous, he was better than that: he was known. So we didn’t worry when he took his time getting the liquor and making his way back to the house. Then we got worried. We called him on his cellphone. No answer. To this day, I don’t know the truth of what happened. Nobody does, least of all the police, who never opened a case, never filed a docket, never made an arrest.

      But the story seems to be that he walked into the shop, and someone took his cellphone, and there was a scuffle. He knew how to fight, but during the scuffle he was stabbed in the back. When he turned around, he was shot, nine times at close range.

      That is not how I wish to remember my father. The abiding image, the imprint that is fixed in my mind, is of him sitting in the driver’s seat of his car, not the Skyline, but a humble VW Golf, his hands gripping the wheel, as if he was ready to go on a journey, looking me in the eye and saying, ‘Look after your mother, okay?’

      In 2017 my wife gave birth to a son, our third child and second boy. I held him in my arms, my grip tender yet strong, in the way a father learns to do, because children are so fragile. He cried to the heavens. His name is Um­nqobi; it means ‘conqueror’. The conqueror of my heart, the conqueror of my soul. The line that connects us is the line that connects me to my father, and him to his father, and all of us to each other, because we all make the same cry when we are born.

      That day, I sat at the coffee table with Nelson Mandela at my side, and I asked him, finally, if I could ask him a question. He seemed a little surprised to hear me speak, but he leaned in closer. I had thought about my question a lot. It wasn’t the most original question in the world, nor was it the most profound. But I asked it anyway.

      ‘Mr Mandela,’ I said, ‘what is your dream for South Africa?’ He nodded to himself, his warm smile giving way to a look of deep, furrowed concentration. I had the feeling that he had thought a lot about this question too. And then he said, ‘South Africans need a little bit of faith. My hope is that they can have just a bit more faith, in themselves and in this country.’

      He spoke of hope, because hope works harder than a dream, because hope rolls up its sleeves and gets down to business. But he spoke of faith too, because faith is the ability to trust the unknown, to believe in the impossible, to see the invisible. And faith is knowing, whatever or whoever you may believe in, wherever you may come from or where you are going to, that the invisible keeps an eye on us too.

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