The Face Of God

God used to smell of incense. He was ritual and the silence of the church. He was song as the choir burst into song and a thousand students stood as the priests made their way to the altar. He was light and darkness, beauty and golden chandeliers, He was there and not there. The three priests would turn to face us. "The Lord be with you", they would say. "And also with you", we would answer. And also with you.

The chapel at my high school, St Columba's Anglican High School, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

God was my face the day the Headmaster made me stand up in front of the students. I used to like to sit in the very front row of the church, all the better to hear the music and watch the rituals unfold in front of me. The breaking of the host and its mysterious transformation into the sacrifice. The pouring of the blood red wine into the silver grail as the choir exploded into song, Igama lenkosi malibongwe. The girls soprano dancing above the rumbling of the boys tenors and bass. I would march up the red carpet and take my seat and watch in wonder and awe, sad that I could not take part in any the communion because I was a Lutheran and not an Anglican.

Usually I would leave unmolested but that day the Headmaster, who was also one of the Head Priests was bellowing through his sermon then suddenly he waved, "you are all made in the image of God. All of you. Love one another because God is in each one of you. You have the Face of God". He looked around and let the words sink in, then he grabbed me by the arm as he gestured for my terrified self to stand up and face a thousand students. "In fact, even this small boy, look at his face. If you ask yourself what God looks like, he probably looks like this." The teasing endured for months. 

Njube Lutheran Church where I was baptised at eight months (c) Agneta Jürisoo and Mats Lagergren,

God was harsher and more stringent at our humbler church whose domes made it look more of a cross between a mosque and a museum. The wall was covered in white plaster that rubbed off on your clothes if you leaned against it and the louvred windows reached almost up to the top of the building letting light stream in throughout the service. Here God was simpler, no incense and no golden chandeliers, the candlesticks were made of simple metal painted black and the flowers picked from the garden outside. No high tech public address system nor red carpet. But He was louder, harsher, more demanding. He was the voice of the pastor whose robes would flail from behind the lectern as he warned us all of the consequences of sin, of the dangers of death, of the evils of the world. My heart beat in wariness of the sins I knew I had committed and in mortal dread of the sins I didn't know I had committed and in absolute horror at the sins I might commit. 

God was mystery at my A-Level school. His words had turned from Shona and Ndebele to Latin as five hundred boys repeated after the brothers. Kyrie elysion, Christe elysion, Kyrie elysion. He was wrapped once again in incense but this incense formed thicker clouds around him with words of dogma, of history and traditions and messages from a Pope, (or to use his formal title: His Holiness, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God.) in the Vatican, thousands of miles away who spoke on His behalf and whose spirt we regularly prayed for. God's mother, Mary, was suddenly everywhere and she was prayed to. Prayed to for her mercy and intercession so she could speak to this mysterious God on our behalf. He was incredible wealth as the brothers spoke of the many other schools like ours around the world but he was also service in action for the poor and oppressed in the world.

The Pietà Madonna by Michelangelo in St Peter's Basilica, The Vatican

But in an instant God became nonsense in Algeria. Suddenly the privilege from living in a 99% majority Christian country disappeared like the morning dew when I found myself in a 99.8% majority Muslim country surrounded by a fraction of the almost two billion Muslims around the world. God was hidden Bibles on our way to church, covered crucifixes around our necks, was a thousand inquisitive questions, some friendly, others harsh where suddenly a lot of 'simple' things became extremely difficult to explain.

"So you have three God's n'est pas?" "No, we have one God". "But you just told me that Jesus and this Holy Spirit person are also God no?" "Yes, yes but they are one." "You literally don't make any sense at all you know that, plus you said God died on a cross!" Latin words and dogma lying in a library somewhere in the Vatican somehow started feeling less comforting. "So this Bible of yours has many versions but some versions are the true one and the one you follow is one of the true ones but not some of the other ones whom you call cults....who gets to decide heh? You know the Koran only has one version?"

Anger and frustration would rise, but also questions that led down paths that sometimes had no answers. Like the time when I was a child and I had piped up during a Bible study session; but if God was really so good why did he put the Apple tree smack bang in the middle of the garden? My question hung in the air like an unexploded bomb until someone told me not ask such silly questions. Perhaps God's answers were in the mosque I attended with my friends several times but the flood of Arabic only raised more mysteries. Perhaps God was only in Zimbabwe and this was indeed a people doomed to fate. Perhaps he was in the Vatican whispering answers to the Pope. Perhaps he was in the streets with the prophets who screamed fire and damnation was nigh to anyone who was not in their denomination of Christianity, one of 38, 000 worldwide. What did I know? Nothing.

I looked at my Algerian, Muslim friend, his face screwed up in confusion at the crawling mass of my stories of this God of ours against the injunction of his Allah. And then I heard Mr Moyo's rumble of a voice from that incense filled building, Your friend has the face of God.

Love him. 

Random Memories

It's lunchtime, I am sitting on the lawn with two of my friends at St Columba's High. We are having lunch, someone cracks a joke and we laugh and I look up at the sky and suddenly time stops. I don't know what it was, perhaps it's the way the sunlight bounced off the clouds or the way the grass smelled with just the hint of the rain that had fallen a few days ago. Something lifted that moment out of itself, came down and lifted me off that lawn and made me feel a peace that looked me in the face for just a moment before disappearing and time started once again. My friends started talking about something else and the hands of time started once more. I did not tell them what had happened.

Darkness is falling outside and the plane is descending slowly towards the lights of Algiers. I look outside the window, my face stuck to the glass as I look upon my new home. It had been two days filled with wonder, my first time outside the country, my first time in a plane, my first time stuck in Paris' airport for six hours because we didn't have visa's to leave. As the plane loses altitude, giving me that annoying sensation in my stomach, I feel a rising awareness that it was now official, I had left home, I had left everything I had known my whole life for this country; this city of a thousand lights staring back at me in the dying sunlight. Was it excitement or dread I felt? The plane lands and we get off onto the land that would be our home for the next four years. The land that some of us would die in. But we didn't know that then, we were just glad to be at journey's end.

I'm standing in front of the school. All their eyes are on me. It's my first time. No one had prepared me for this. My teacher for some reason had thought it was a good idea to make me give the prayer at assembly that day. I had not. I was right. But it's too late. I can feel my heart in my throat. I am only ten years old. The dimensions of the hall seem gigantic and I am lost on the stage with a sea of eyes on me. The silence is absoloute as they all wait for me to say something. The teachers, the prefects, the rows upon rows of khakhi shirts and white, black and brown faces. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. By now I have forgotten the prayer I had been practising since yesterday. Panic.
I run off the stage. For the next few days I feel as if the whole school is laughing at me. I promise myself I will learn how to speak on stage.

We are drunk with happiness. Driving around town talking loudly over the music. I don't remember who dares me to walk into Creamy Inn and order fish in french (bear in mind this is in Zimbabwe). Surprisingly I take up his dare. We get in, all four of us. I walk up to the counter and start blabbering at the poor girl in french. For a moment she is dumbfounded then she screams at her colleagues, "Nangu umuntu uyangithethisa!!!!" We reassure we are not and end up laughing with her as we order ice cream. Next up is a parlour where my cousin asks for a banana milkshake but because he is allergic to milk, they should just shake the banana's. They call security.

It's time to swim again. What that means is that I and the few others who can't swim have to spend an hour paddling in the shallow end whilst the rest of the class goes through their drills. But not this time. Our teacher is not at school and the teacher who has replaced her is determined to make all of us swim. She tells the rest of the class to do something and spends the rest of the hour trying to get us to swim. I am scared. I am wishing our teacher was there to ignore us. I hate the water, I am scared of sinking in its depths and never coming back. I tell her that. She tells me the water will never let me sink. That my body will float. She kneels down by the edge of the pool and tells me to imagine I am sinking into my bed. I will fall but my bed will always catch me. Imagining things is what I am good at. I close my eyes and I sink into my bed of water. I am falling. Falling. The panic is beginning to rise but just as I am about to stand up I feel the water lifting me up. My little legs are kicking and my arms are flailing in every direction. How ungraceful I must look but all I can remember thinking is, I can swim!

It is assembly again. I am 8 years old old this time. My vaseline smeared face is bright with expectation. My first assembly in the big school. We all sit there, rows upon rows of khaki clad children. The little ones like us are near the front, nearest to the stage where the projector sits with its assistants who place a slide and light up the front of the hall. The piano starts playing and the whole school bursts into English church hymns. Amazing Grace, Morning has Broken, To God Be the Glory. It is another world, I sit there lost in it all. The music ends and as the silence settles the headmaster takes to the stage. He starts speaking in English and my heart falls in my chest. So many complicated words, so many things that just go straight over my head. I look around, everyone is listening attentively, suddenly I feel so small and so sad. On the way home I tell my mother what had happened. When we get home she hands me her dictionary from her High School days. I begin reading it. I tell myself I will never sit through another assembly like the one I had had that morning. It takes me years to get halfway.

The night sky is covered in stars like it is the carpet of God's house. Thousands upon thousands upon millions upon millions. I can smell the smoke from the fire and in the distance I can hear the gentle clinging of the bells the cows wear around their necks. The night air is filled with the sound of crickets, of the murmur of my mother and her sisters as they speak in Sotho and every now and again, of my granny's cackle. This is her world, a world of fields and thorn trees, of lakes and rivers, of cows and goats, of grass as high as your knees of night skies covered in diamonds. It is a world of mosquito's and the smell of the manure that is pounded into the floor of the kitchen, of the dogs lying in the sidelines, waiting for any chance scrap of food they might catch as it flies through the air. I snuggle closer into my mothers' arms and fall asleep.

All I live is regret, all I suffer is memory.

I Am Trayvon Martin

An African American student who is a friend of a friend of mine wrote on his Facebook wall that he was shocked by the Trayvon Martin verdict (see my previous blog here). Someone responded:

"Don't take this to heart. You are a very smart, very talented, handsome guy, don't let yourself be dragged into this mentality. You are not going to be shot- you carry yourself well, speak well, walk and dress well. Martin was not killed because of the color of his skin, he was killed because he got into a very violent altercation with an armed man...Martin, RIP, had pictures of marihuana (sic) in his cellphone, texts about buying a gun illegally, and lots of racist profanity against white Americans. This was not about race. I'm telling you because you are new to this country and while its true that there is racism out there, this case wasn't it....You're a smart, educated, good looking guy. Believe me, you're not Martin."

There is something fundamentally sad, something fundamentally wrong about this. Something that struck me to the core with an anger that felt almost powerless against such passive discrimination. It is a discrimination so silent, so cloaked in politeness you almost get hoodwinked by its seeming logic and tell yourself that all is well. But then the questions hits you: are people who carry images of marijuana in their phones supposed to be shot? Should we be shot for the content of our Whatsapp messages? Once those questions start coming in, the floodgates open: am I supposed to be safe because of the way I dress? If I dress like a "thug", should I be shot on sight? Is what a wear, an indicator of who I am? Are the lives of those who buy their clothes from Fifth Avenue in New York, Sandton City in Johannesburg or Sam Levy Village in Harare more valuable than those whose clothes are from the corner thrift shop?

"You are not going to be shot - you carry yourself well, speak well, walk and dress well...." Whites can carry and talk whichever way they want to but if a black person carries himself well, then he is safe. What does this imply for those who don't? Let's not fool ourselves. This is about race. This is about discrimination, about the snap judgements of those who see the world as simply black and white, good and bad, they who subscribe to Cersei Lannister's motto: "Everyone who isn't us is an enemy". Certainly George Zimmerman revealed as much in his call to Emergency Services, "...they always get away", he complained. Who is 'they' we might ask?

I talk well. I like to think I dress well and I carry myself well. I learn at one of Europe's best schools, so supposedly I am safe right? Wrong. I have been a Trayvon Martin so many times it hurts. In Algeria where I would be the only one made to get off the bus and unpack my baggage to be inspected at police roadblocks. One officer went so far as to taste my toothpaste. The fact that I was the only black on the bus does not seem that much of a coincidence. In university where my professors would call me "l'africain" instead of ever trying to learn my proper name.

In Germany where I was the only black on a flight filled with Europeans and Arabs, where I was pulled out of the queue at boarding and put in a little room and interrogated, my hand luggage searched, my laptop scanned and my passport stamps and visa's examined in great detail.

In South Africa where I was helping my cousin shop for her wedding dress and the white owners of the shop completely ignored us for twenty minutes but went running to a white couple who had just come in to ask the price of a necklace. At the South African Post Office where the white manager told me I was "a problem" and that I should go back home instead of trying to open a bank account with my "fake" passport.

But closest to home, the day I was approached by one of our white neighbours who lived in the complex where my parents live. In all my innocence, dressed well, speaking well, carrying myself well, she approached me and asked me what I was looking for there. Who cares that I had unlocked the gate with my security code, that I had actually had a conversation with her a few months earlier when I happened to meet her in the garden; no, no one cares. To her I was suspicious just for being there. I didn't belong there.

I didn't belong there in much the same way Trayvon Martin did not belong there that fateful evening. I looked strange for being as normal as I could possibly be, in much the same way Trayvon Martin looked strange for walking home slowly from the shops talking on his phone to his friend. I was guilty of something in much the same way Trayvon Martin was guilty of carrying images of marijuanna on his phone. Something just had to be wrong. Something just had to not click. So she came up to me and asked me what I was doing there.

We are all Trayvon Martin's. We are all judged and told we do not belong every time we walk into a shop and security starts surreptitiously following us around. Every time one of us gets shot for being afraid of the big Hispanic man following him in the dark night. Which one of us would not stand their ground? Trayvon Martin did. And George Zimmerman decided he didn't belong not only in that neighbourhood. But on this earth. And the jury agreed.

RIP Trayvon Martin.

"What is really injured, bruised, if you will, is the psyche of our national population. We are all harmed. We are all belittled, and we give to the rest of the world more ammunition to sneer at us." - Maya Angelou speaking on the Trayvon Martin verdict.

Algérie Mon Amour | Algeria My Love

Today the strangest thing in the world happened. Due to an unfortunate - and technically illegal - oversight, I left Algeria without completing my documents and today I was forced to make the long trek to the Algerian embassy in Pretoria to try and sort it out. I went there braced for the worst, used as I was to the Algerian system of bureaucracy, and yet lo and behold not only did the diplomat who I talked to turn out to be completely helpful, frank and friendly we actually even chatted for a few minutes.

This led me to think that for once in my life I would dedicate an entire blog to listing my top five positives about Algeria that I encountered during my stay there. My friends who still live there will have a mouthful to say about this I predict but I assure you, once you put 8000km’s between yourself and Zinedine Zidane’s country, you cannot but help put on the rose tinted glasses as you gaze at it perched snugly on the crown of the African continent. So here goes:

5. Their ridiculous prices

Get this, tuition at any of Algeria’s universities is…wait for it…two United States dollars; yes you read that right US$2.00. (I am using the exchange rate I last encountered). The University of Johannesburg is averaging around US$4000 and the University of Cape Town I am told sits comfortably above the five grand mark. Their fuel costs a measly 20 cents a litre and a public bus in the capital will set you back a measly 15 cents but if you are university student you can hop onto the universities shuttle bus service which will cost you…fifty cents per YEAR. Hold on, what about the state of the art tram system they just installed? 20 cents.  How about in the realm of telecoms? A dollar will give you almost thirteen minutes of talk-time and heck, if you charge up your phone with ten dollars at a go, they’ll throw in eight hours talk-time free. I remember I once started a phone conversation as I was cutting up the onions for my dinner and only finished it as I sat down to a plate of steaming rice and chicken which had all been cooked whilst I talked. Where else in the world do you get that?

4. Speaking of food…

The Mediterrenean palate for me was like a trip to paradise and back, except for olives which I somehow never acquired a taste for. But if you are content to suffer those little balls of concentrated posion that even Jesus used to eat then you will be well rewarded. Where do I start? There is the ‘poulet rotti’, which is a spiced and herbed chicken put on a flaming rottiserie and left to grill on the streetside. Or the ‘shwarma’, a French loaf as long as your forearm stuffed with grilled turkey, French fries, tomatoes, onions, lettuce and generously drizzled with mayonnaise. Or couscous served with spiced chicken drowning in soup. What about a glass of Orangina to quench your thirst? What is Orangina you ask? It is the perfect balance between a fruit juice and a soft drink, hell it even has its own Wikipedia page. Or their curious habit of dressing French fries with mayonnaise and salads with vinegar (the exact opposite of how it’s done in Zimbabwe). Who was I to complain? I grew up hating sadza so an entire region where it didn’t exist was bound to leave me as pleased as punch!

3. The architecture

For the most part I will admit that Algeria is left behind when compared to South Africa in contemporary architecture but there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the way they approach the art of building anything. Let us sweep aside for a moment the architectural exceptions of my native land and that of my adopted land. Let us take an ordinary building, sitting by the corner of a busy street and housing a small boutique owned by a small family. You see it? Well back in Zimbabwe that building would almost be invariably be square or rectangular and completely functional with the government approved minimum of windows, a door and a display. Now let us imagine that family is Algerian. That building is transformed almost immediately into a testament of Franco-Islamic architecture, filigreed metal adorns the balcony that serves no other function but to exist. The eaves of the building are held up by two stone male figures that seem to come up out of the building at waist level, their naked chests daring the street with their feat of strength. Corners are softened by sculptures of leaves that seem to want to drop leaf-like into the forest of cars below. Even the Algiers Post Office has a Wikipedia column to itself, it’s a building that awed me the first time I stepped into it and trust me, Post Offices rarely do that to me (or anyone else for that matter).

2. Français

There is nothing sexier than speaking in French. Seriously the language does things to the meanings of words, it wraps them up in a cloak of culture, peppers their noses with oh just a touch of expensive eau de toilette and then sends them out to the world to give French kisses to the ears of passing listeners. The ordinary gains a level of sophistication, and the sophisticated just seduces you and leaves you on your knees screaming for more. I used to love Céline Dion (don’t pretend you don’t) even before I went to the Maghreb but when I heard her singing in French, I almost cursed the bastard who taught her English. It’s a beautiful language with a thousand and one cute idiosyncrasies, for example the eau de toilette all those perfume companies proudly stamp on their bottles simply means toilet water. Or the French for ‘I miss you’ in English literally translates to, ‘I have a lack of you’. Or their method of slapping bon which means ‘good’ to everything so that they come up with bonjour (good day), bonsoir (good evening), bon appetite (enjoy your meal), bon fête (happy holiday), bon café (enjoy your coffee), bon douche (enjoy your bath; I kid you not, people actually wish each other well even for that).

1. My friends

It is never an easy thing to uproot yourself from everything you know; your family, your language, your culture and religion and plant yourself smack in the middle of someone else’s world. But when you do pray that you have friends like the ones I encountered there. Friends who came in all different shapes, sizes and with nationalities ranging from Algerian through to Ugandan and Rwandan all the way to trusty old Zimbabwean. In a country which enjoys all the benefits I have just described and which a famous poet once described as a ‘dream of sand’, you can imagine all great moments we shared. Roasted chicken shared over a brick somehow rewired to serve as a heater, racing each other  through the university residence at 3am the night before an end of year of exam (the nerves had gotten the best of us), breaking the Ramadan fast with my friends family or almost drowning at the beach when I got caught by a rip tide. Falling asleep on one of our cross country bus tours, fighting about the colour of the wallpaper in our room, walking five kilometres in the snow because the highway was closed, making out furtively in hidden corners…my friends and my enemies, my loves and my haters made Algeria the experience that it was.

Searching for the rainbow with no end

Today's blog is a bit more personal and ridiculous than my previous entries, I am trying out something new please bear with me if I haven't yet found the perfect formula. Whilst I'm still on the subject thank you for your support, I now boast a grand total of three follower including myself but more interesting almost three hundred and sixty hits in the past month.

Anyway for those who happen to stumble upon my blog by accident, My name is Bongani Ncube-Zikhali, I'm 23 years old and I am currently unemployed. Yeah, sad situation no? I recently finished my studies at the University of Tlemcen in Algeria (not to be confused with Nigeria; Algeria is the one with the bombs, Nigeria is the one with the corruption), did a stint of free lance journalism with the Mail & Guardian and just generally been bouncing around from one country to the next over the past few years. My current base of operations is Johannesburg, South Africa (that's the one with the hijackings).

The thing is over the past few years I have come to realise something very unsettling about myself: I am never content. Consider this, I started my high school experience in a school located in a township called Makokoba in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (that's the one which had a trillion dollar note at some point). Makokoba was (and unless the new mayor of Bulawayo is a genius, still is) a dilapidated and sad location. There was a river of sewage that ran just outside the school fence. There were kids who used to wait for us outside the school gates who would "borrow" our lunch monies while dangling sharp blades in our faces to encourage our zero percent interest rates. And a teacher once beat me and the rest of the boys in my class with the handle of a broom (I kid you not!) Needless to say, my first few years of high school were amongst the most miserable I've ever spent in my teenage years.

You would imagine that when it was announced that I would attend one of the most prestigious private schools in the region, if not the country I would jump up and down for joy? No I didn't. My first response to my parents was that it was too expensive (we would later sell our car to keep me in school) and that I had no intention of going. But being an African child of African parents I ended up going against my will. And was immediately miserable the whole first year. I couldn't stand the snobs, the flashy cars and cellphones and the endless school activities private school's dream up to keep you busy from Sunday to Sunday. The two year experience was spent missing my "happy haven in the township" but it was soon over and by some strange twist of fate, Zimbabwean taxpayers generosity and an aversion to power cuts I found my self in Algeria.

The story is still told of how I almost broke down on my first night there. French was as foreign to me as Greek and Arabic sounded like an extra terrestrial language. I also was not particularly taken by the idea of bathing in a bucket for the next four years (something which I did for the past four years nonetheless). Suddenly that private school and its merry gang of coconuts seemed like heaven and I spent most of my first years there pining away for Zimbabwe and the sweet comforts of home. But four years is a long time and there comes a time when you can competently order a pizza in Arabic and French, you know where all the post office branches are and suddenly the place seems like home. Someone upstairs must have thought I was getting too comfortable because once again, my life was turned upside down.

This time I was meant to go to Paris for two years, learning at the University of Paris in Paris (yeah I have a talent for stating the obvious don't I?) but somehow I ended up in the City of Gold (that's what the inhabitants of Johannesburg call their city though I think they might have mixed it up with a certain description in the Bible). And guess what? I suddenly miss Algeria with all my heart. Yet only four months ago I couldn't leave fast enough (the woman who arranged my flight had to deal with me morning and night, she must have breathed a sigh of relief when I finally left). And yet here I am sitting in the richest city on the continent and yet wishing I could leave.

It's always over the horizon for me, somewhere out there, calling to me in a language I can hardly understand but that leaves my heart unsettled. I hope I find it soon because at the rate I'm going, I might soon end up going crazy and deciding to go live in a hut in the middle of the desert in Botswana (that's the one with all the diamonds). Maybe I'm Oscar Wilde's dreamer, who can only find his way by moonlight. Here's to hoping I find my way soon enough.

*all country stereotypes are provided by CNN, BBC & SkyNews