Sometimes There Is a Void by Zakes Mda

particularly to look at the beekeeping project of the Lower Telle Beekeepers Collective; according to a colourful brochure one of the tourists is reading: This community-based project was initiated and is supported by Zakes Mda, one of South Africa’s leading authors, who grew up in this area.
    When the tourists are introduced to me they are pleasantly surprised to meet in a Drakensberg mountain village this rotund fellow who is a novelist and a professor at an American university. Unfortunately Gugu and I cannot join them for the precarious drive up the mountain to the apiary. We need to be in Mafeteng, Lesotho, by the evening to see my mother, and then leave the next morning for Johannesburg. The Bee People don’t need us anyway. They welcome tourists all the time, ever since their project was listed as one of the major tourist attractions of the district. They are happy of course that by coincidence we were there when this particular group of tourists arrived and we have added some value to their experience since they only came to visit the bees, breathe the clean mountain air and, according to the brochure … enjoy a taste of the mouth-watering honey.
    This last bit is not just hype. Telle Honey – the brand name with a smiling bee on the label designed by my son Neo, who is an art director at a Johannesburg advertising agency – is reputed to have a unique taste because of a combination of Cape aloes and other indigenous plants that grow only in that region.
    Undoubtedly the tourists will also enjoy the view of both the Dyarhom and the eSiqikini Mountains with the steep cliffs, clear streams and white beehives speckling the green mountainside. Imagine if my grandfather’s orchard was still there. Imagine. Without anybody to prune them, the trees would have grown in all wild directions and the fruit wouldn’t be as large as it was when my grandfather cared for them. But in spring they would contribute a new dimension to the bee food that has made the honey unique and in summer would feed the passers-by with abundant fruit.
Unfortunately, my Uncle Owen would have none of that. He murmured to himself ‘amandla ka tata akana’wudliwa ngabany’abantu’ – I’ll not have the sweat from my father’s brow benefit strangers – as he spent days on end chopping down tree after tree soon after the mountain dwellers were forced down to the lowlands by the apartheid government. When I heard how he chopped down all those fruit trees, I lost all respect for him. The spirit of my grandfather lived in those trees. Besides, I instinctively recoil from a person who is callous enough to chop down a tree – any tree, but more especially a fruit tree – without just cause. I am wary of any person who can be so emotionally stunted as to kill a tree without experiencing something inside him dying with the tree.
    Gugu and I wave our goodbyes to the tourists as the Bee People’s truck leads their luxury bus up the narrow dirt road. Hopefully the bus driver is good enough to negotiate his way on the steep hill. The tourists had better not look out the windows otherwise they may freak out when they see hundreds of yards away all those skeletons of cars that have rolled down the mountain over the years.
    Gugu and I get into our car and drive to the Telle Bridge into Lesotho. From the apiary the tourists will cross this bridge as well. And the tour guide will tell them about its significance in South Africa’s history. I noticed in the brochure that the bridge is one of the tourist attractions: Wind your way down to Telle Bridge, to see the historic border gate where in 1977 Donald Woods, the then editor of the Daily Dispatch, escaped into exile disguised as a priest. It is a story that was later told in the 1987 Richard Attenborough movie, ‘Cry Freedom’, featuring Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline, about the friendship between Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness