Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda

he knew how to use words that caused invisible weals on your body that would be as painful as the welts of flagellation. He had a way of making you feel not only that you were a disappointment to yourself and your parents, but you had also let the whole continent of Africa down – from Cape to Cairo, Morocco to Madagascar. ‘Africa cannot afford to have people who do such things,’ he would say.
    He was busy with his law practice, spending all day long in his office which was a room in our house with a separate entrance. Or at the
magistrate’s court in town defending clients in both civil and criminal matters. In the evenings he spent hours in his garden, which had been landscaped by Old Xhamela who had been imported from KwaGcina for that purpose. My siblings and I were resentful that every evening – when all the kids of the township were playing games in the street – we had to go home to work in the garden. We had to draw water with watering cans from the communal borehole just outside our yard and line them up for him to do the watering. He did not believe we were capable of watering his tomatoes, spinach, cabbages and carrots without making a mess of things so he preferred to water them himself. He was so obsessive about watering his garden that even when it had rained, we still had to draw water from the borehole for him to water the plants.
    We also had to water his peach trees of different varieties that lined the plot and bore fruit most seasons of the year. Even in winter some trees produced big smooth red nectarines. What amazed the people of the township was that the trees were short, about the height of a man, whereas the peach trees with which they were familiar grew taller than a house. Once or twice a year, depending on the variety, Old Xhamela pruned our trees so well that the fruit they bore was gigantic.
    We knew that at night Bomvana and the kids from the poor side of the township stole our peaches, but we said nothing about it. They boasted about it when they waylaid us on the way from school, but we couldn’t tell on them for fear of the further violence they would unleash on us.
    I liked to watch Old Xhamela work in the garden. Quite often I joined him with my sketch book and crayons, and drew our house from the vantage point of the garden. I loved drawing the red-brick house because its architecture was unique. Whereas the house next door, Nikelo and Xolile’s home, was a Spanish-type bungalow with yellow rough-cast walls, ours had a red-brick grass-thatched rondavel that was linked to the rest of the red-brick house by a plastered cream-coloured corridor. It was roofed in black-painted corrugated iron. At the other end of the building there was a porch with a red stoep and a glass door that opened into my father’s office.
    I never tired of drawing the house from different angles, and Old
Xhamela never tired of giving me his feedback. He was quite an art critic too; in one drawing he pointed out that I had drawn the chimney on the roof even though from the angle where we were standing it could not be seen. You would only see it if you went to the back of the house where the kitchen was located. I had only placed it there, he added, because I knew of its existence from memory, but the drawing was not realistic because I should depict only the things that the eye could see.
    His comments were just as useful when I drew the peach trees, the gigantic tomatoes bursting with redness, and the ujiza birds – both the blackchested and the brownspotted prinia waving their tails from side to side. Sometimes a pair of thickbilled larks visited and perched on the fence. I painted them, exaggerating their speckled heads and wings. Here again, Old Xhamela noted my misrepresentation. He was a stickler for realism. I never had the heart to tell him that the distortions were deliberate, that I found the birds boring in their natural dull brown colours and thought they needed