HELEN JOSEPH HOSPITAL, JOHANNESBURG
Elise Radipodi had been seeing her daughter Karabo everywhere since she went silent, even while she was on night shift at Helen Joseph public hospital.
That night, the sounds of raised voices chanting ‘Iyoh Solomon’ drifted in through an open window while Elise catalogued the daily disasters on the psychiatric ward in her report. Since she had been there, three EEG machines were stolen en route to the ward, the aircons weren’t working, and the incorrect dosage of medication delivered as a cost-saving measure had compromised patient care once more. Outside, the voices grew louder and more insistent, pulling Elise from her chair. It was the Wits students again, protesting a 10.5% hike in fees. Nyalas trailed behind them, as ready to shoot then as they had been in 1976. Elise worried that Karabo was among them singing with her fist in the air. She squinted and could have sworn that she saw her child in a pink and purple hoodie in the crowd of students. She was about to leave the floor when the doors to the ward swung open.
A stretcher was wheeled in by Sister Bernadine Cloete and one of the porters. “Transfer from Rahima Moosa,” she said in a hoarse voice, handing Elise the patient file. She was no-nonsense with a tight grey and white ponytail, and badges on her epaulettes that displayed her experience. She had been at Helen Joseph longer than Elise, nearly 10 years. Elise, only 11 months.
On the bed was small girl in a hospital gown with the province’s circular emblem stamped on it. Her hands and feet were tied to the bed frame. Her face was turned to the side, but Elise could hear her muttering under her breath. Something about that girl’s curl pattern and her reddish hue made Elise frantically move to the side of the bed and turn the patient's face towards her. She was relieved that Karabo’s face wasn’t looking back.
“Wat doen jy, fokken goffel—what are you doing, ugly woman!” the patient said in her Coronationville accent, snapping her kk’s and ff’s.
“She’s mental,” Sister Bernadine said, drawing air circles around her ear until she saw Elise turn away to hide her hurt. “Any word from your daughter?”
“She’s been quiet. Probably buried in exam prep,” Elise said, as she opened the patient’s file.
“When my son calls I know he needs money,” Sister Bernadine said as she headed toward the doors. “I’m happy when my phone is quiet. When the patients are quiet, even better.”
Elise read parts of the patient file out loud. Nineteen. But much smaller than my Karabo. Too small to be a mother. The death of neonate by accidental over-oxygenation. So grief shifted her from the maternity ward to psychiatry.
Elise moved to undo the green belts from the patient’s wrists and ankles. She remembered that Karabo hadn’t liked being tied when she was hospitalized. Elise wasn’t sure how long she took her eyes off the sedated patient, but it was enough time for the woman to pierce the tender flesh of her palm with her teeth. Elise grabbed the patient’s arms while simultaneously reaching for the panic button on the wall. No one responded. At her previous hospital in Coventry, the panic buttons were clipped on as part of their uniform. She had to restrain the manic, heartbroken mother on her own. Time and again, Elise had written about the weakness of the generic sedatives in her reports, but nothing came of it. She couldn’t stay at this decaying mess of a hospital much longer. She would have to persuade Karabo to go back to England with her.
She was ready to do final rounds at 5am when her phone vibrated. Karabo finally, she thought. She last spoke to Karabo in February when dropping her daughter off in Res, but they had texted regularly, until last month when she went silent. The last flurry of jumbled-up emojis from Karabo were alarming enough for Elise to call, but Karabo didn’t pick up. Elise struggled to make sense of the arrangement of the yellow faces, a ball of yarn, a clock, and mismatched symbols in response to her ‘just checking in.’ Her nurse brain shouted word salad, but she went with her mom brain instead. Nothing to worry about. In the last month there was no response to her messages. Elise’s lightly worded questions about her prescription refill and cute cat videos remained single-ticked. Winter break was fast approaching, mom voice reminded her. She would take her to see Dr. Moodley to have her prescription evaluated then.
There was a man’s voice on the line. He identified himself as Mkhulu. “Are you Karabo Radipodi’s mother?” he said. “You were listed as her emergency contact.”
Elise’s mind conjured up different emergencies Karabo could have got herself tangled in. A near-drowning at her learn-to-swim classes. Food poisoning from eating day-old fries from a cheap kota place. A car accident on her way back from clubbing in Melville with her res mates. Her mind paged through scenario after scenario until she shut the file closed.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s sleeping now, but we need to talk about the next steps to take.”
It sounded like a crisis episode, possibly triggered by the stress of the upcoming June exams in a few weeks. Under duress, Karabo tended to hyper-focus on the task at hand, forgetting to eat or take her medication. This is the reason why she had always ensured there were only a few minutes between her and her daughter. At this hour before the morning traffic, she could compress the eight minute drive to four.
“I’m on my way. Are you at the medical centre or should I come straight to res?”
“We are in Naledi.”
Elise felt rising heat. The only Naledi she knew was in Soweto, a township 22 kilometres away.
Elise scratched her twitching eyebrow. She had so looked forward to having Karabo home for the winter holidays after a first term on her own. But left alone, she had managed to twist herself up in her sheets.
SOWETO
An hour later, Elise was in her scrubs, driving into Soweto. Exhausted, but still wired after knocking off from a 12 hour shift. She steered her white Volvo into the snaky roads of Naledi township, passing rows and rows of houses too small to live in. She had to move with caution because early morning commuters jutted into the road, rushing across without warning to board buses and taxis. The older ones knowingly held handkerchiefs to their mouths against the yellow dust, but the teens in grey and blue school uniforms didn’t seem to feel it’s sting on their skin.
From a distance, the mine dumps looked like mountains. There was already a fine layer of dust on Elise’s dashboard. It looked harmless, but she knew it contained traces of uranium, copper, lead and even cyanide. This fine yellow brittle had caught in her plaits when she was a student nurse, forcing her to unravel the fresh rows. They remind me of the pyramids, she once said to Mbuso, in a romantic haze, gazing through the window of his small room behind his grandmother’s house. He quickly corrected her—they were mounds of radioactive poison. It was 1994 and his capacity to dream had died eighteen years earlier when his brother went missing.
Mbuso had shown up with friends for a birthday party at the nurses’ home, wearing a dirty t-shirt with a hastily screen-printed message: free student buses. To Elise’s irritation, he spoke feverishly over the music about the rights of black students, his balding head sweating when he tried to make a point. “Is he always like this?” Elise asked one of his friends. “He is doing this for you, can’t you see? He’s been trying to catch your attention all night.”
Elise had to admit that she admired how passionate Mbuso was about the plight of his fellow students. He spent so much time campaigning and fighting for others that it compromised his own studies. By the end of that year, Elise was spending more nights in the single bed at his grandmother’s house than at the nurses’ home. When Elise passed by and greeted her, his grandmother tapped her cigarette ash into the blue soap water where she was soaking white men’s shirts. Elise realized later that the old woman was stuck in a state of perpetual mourning for her eldest grandson. No one could be good enough for her Mbuso, the only child she had left.
In their first week back in South Africa, Elise had seen Mbuso on the seven o’clock news arguing for silica-affected miners. Still stuttering and sweating whenever he tried to make a point, she thought. Still fighting for pointless causes. Mines had been refusing to take accountability since 1886. Her own father had been sent home with a few month’s pay and a bicycle after he survived a locomotive crash on the job. She thought of calling Mbuso to tell him they were back. She dialed his number, but hung up before the first ring. She decided to wait for Karabo to get settled first before inviting her father over.
NALEDI, SOWETO
Karabo could hear the drumming and singing of Angzenzelanga from the other amatwasa in the yard. It was a song she had led weeks before. The lyrics- I didn’t choose this- spoke to her. Even after Mkhulu had told her that she didn’t have a clear gift, she still stayed in the impande, wearing her red skirt and the ochre in her hair like everyone else. But unlike them, no reed mats would be laid out for her homecoming. No goat blood to imbibe and purge. No songs would be sung to her in her new name.
When she first arrived at the impande, they took icy dips in cold river water at 5 am. Cleansing was the first step in the process of ukutwasa. Karabo felt the second skin she had been shielding herself with in Coventry and Naledi peel off. In England, the girl had drawn curious eyes and mimicking sniggers at her accent when she asked a question in class. It surprised her when the same abuse happened here. Whenever she attempted to read the bones, the other amatwasa called her a Woolworths twasa.
Mkhulu mixed buckets of bitter herbs for them each morning that had Karabo vomiting the slime of criticisms she had swallowed—knock-knees, tough hair, African accent, black girl and more recently, white girl. At the end of her first week there, she saw the loathing that had harboured behind her liver, slither out live. When done, she immersed herself in clouds of medicinal steam and poison came out of her pores.
When other amatwasa reached the inevitable point of tired and secretly called home, Karabo found her strength. Her forearms grew veiny from crushing roots. The skin on her knees blackened from perpetual kneeling and her heels cracked from being summoned to dance at strange hours of the night. She took elaborate mental notes on all the traditional herbs and roots and what they did: the right insizi could cure fainting spells and epilepsy, while isduli could help clarify dreams and was used as a place to communicate with one’s ancestors.
Two months into the process, she still hadn’t received a name from either of her guiding ancestors—not the quiet boy in a black and white school uniform who asked in Zulu have you seen my grandmother? or her grandmother, a short woman with a reddish hue who wore a paisley cloth around her head. Your mother never told you about me? she asked in a quick patter like Elise’s. Although her grandmother would speak to Karabo at length in private, she would simply be quiet among people at the impande as if the drums and songs irritated her.
Karabo had pain in the bridge between her shoulders, crippling headaches, legs that swelled up so she sometimes could not walk. Were these not the signs of a calling? Or was she wrong? The diagnosis she had received of paranoid schizophrenia had come after being examined and questioned by different doctors. The doctor said she could have a normal life, with adjustments, but she didn’t know how to make sense of this version of her new self who would need medication and therapy just to live.
Mkhulu called her to the hut where she had first had her bone reading. Now she understood exactly what each medicine in the jars did and what each bone meant. But that didn’t mean that she was called. “I wish all the amatwasa had your discipline,” he said with kindness in his voice. She knew that without her ancestors’ participation, she could not proceed. He suspected that it wasn’t a calling, but a spiritual illness that she had, requiring other forms of help.
Karabo asked to remain a few days longer, without a plan. While the others were learning songs for ukuvuma ukufa, the next step, she crushed medicine.
“Steal some,” the boy urged Karabo in a whisper when she recognized the white sticks for amagobongo, the medicines that agitated even the most quiet spirits. It was mixed with water and stirred hard with a sticky until a white foam formed. Karabo stirred it by the light of the moon, while the other amatwasa slept. She ate the stolen foam by handfuls, scooping it into her mouth until all went black.
Mkhulu tried to explain everything to Elise before bringing her to Karabo’s room.
“Are you telling me my child has been here for over a month and no one notified me?”
Mkhulu Nyoka sighed. "That is why I don’t like taking in amatwasa without their families present. Karabo told me you were working in England.
Elise couldn’t believe her daughter had taken to blatant lying. “We were both in England,” she said. “We came home together twelve months ago.”
There was a sweet, oily smell of plant and animal in the small room, whose combination irritated her nostrils. Her eyes jutted around the room, taking in the candelabra with yellow candles burning, the cloths of maroon and blue adorning the wall and the arrangement of bottles and jars with grainy powders and dense, oily liquids.
“My purpose as a Gobela is to connect amatwasa with their guiding ancestors and guide them on their spiritual journey, ” explained Mkhulu, a lanky fellow with a snake totem cloth wrapped around his jeans. The rest of the road would be determined by the twasa’s ancestors, who would specify whether their child would become a diviner of destinies, a traveller between here and the afterlife, or a healer gifted in detecting illness in a human being. It was all in their hands. And whether the twasa chose to respond or not, it was already mapped out in their blood.
Karabo was in a small room at the back. Small piles of dead skin from her heels were stacked near her, a clear sign that she was in the middle of a crisis. She had lost so much weight that Elise could see the knobs of her spine. Her face was distorted by the grit of her jaw. It wasn’t the first time Karabo hadn’t been herself. She disappeared. Her frantic mother found her two days later, accompanied by members of the neighborhood watch. That was the first time she was hospitalized.
“We don’t get these illnesses,” Sister Natsai Zimba said, despite working with teenagers who had debilitating mental conditions. Her colleague recommended that Elise take Karabo home. “Sometimes all one needs is to step on the dust of their home yard. That is a cure in itself.”
Those words stayed with Elise as she watched Karabo worsen, from a jumbled up history essay to being hospitalised under supervision. Elise took all the precautions for their travel, booking an overnight flight, so that they would both be asleep while the plane made its six thousand mile journey through the night sky from London to Johannesburg. At 4 am, Karabo woke up, frantically looking around as if she didn’t know where she was.
“Are we going to die?” she asked, gripping Elise’s arm in a panic. She searched frantically in her purse for the emergency-only sedatives, spilling everything on the floor, while her daughter’s shouts woke up the slumbering passengers.
Karabo stood up as if to go to the door. “I need to get off!”
Elise’s eyes went between her daughter and the irritable man next to them pressing the assistance button repeatedly. It was a relief when the calm flight attendant helped settle Karabo down, holding her hand while walking her through breathing exercises. All of Elise’s training had left her in that moment. She was just a mother covered in shame.
Elise brought her purse to put Karabo’s things in, but there was nothing to pack. All Karabo had left was this one hoodie, whose pink and purple sleeves had turned dingy brown with dirt. On the weekend before Karabo moved out of home, Elise splurged her entire government nurse’s salary on baggy jeans and fluffy unicorn slippers. She didn’t pull her daughter back when she put five tie-dye hoodies into the trolley, one for each day of the week. Everything that a uni girl would want. The only thing that was different was the pill canister on her study shelf, with medications for each day of the week. Elise wrote clear instructions in her firm nurse handwriting— two yellow pills in the morning after breakfast, one blue before bed, plus half of the white one, only when you need it. She didn't want to embarrass her so she stuck it inside the door of her closet.
It had been a rollercoaster ride balancing dosages and combinations of her medication: the haloperidol pulled at the muscles in her face and neck, the diazepams that made her feel sleepy all the time and the lithium that gave her a permanent dry mouth. But slowly, Karabo began to sound like herself. Elise was ecstatic the first time she heard her run a bath for herself.
“Careful not to take too many credits,” Elise cautioned, reluctant to allow herself to get excited when Karabo got accepted into Architectural Studies. When they watched ‘Dinner for One’ together on New Year’s Eve, Elise’s heart was salved by Karabo’s cackles. Now she thought how foolish she had been to allow herself the triumph of mom tears that Sunday in January when she left her daughter behind at the campus res. All it took was a moment of looking away for Karabo to plunge.
GOPANE VILLAGE, ZEERUST
Karabo insisted that they go home-home.
Elise stood in front of the brick house her father had built by hand as a wedding gift for their mother before touching the wood door. It saddened her that all it needed was a slight push and everything owned inside would be for the world to see. Radipodi had first seen the farm-style brick house while passing by a Germiston suburb on his way to Rose Deep Gold, where he worked for eleven months out of the year. That Christmas, villagers came to watch him replicate the house brick by brick from memory. It was the first to have a green tin roof, nothing like the ochre and thatch-roofed structures that everyone else lived in.
Radipodi’s house was a wedding gift to Mma-Elise. It had white lime walls that left a print on your back when you leaned on them. For many years afterwards, newlyweds came to touch the white powder as a sign of eternal love.
Within the hour, Karabo was perched on the wooden skeleton of a sofa, paging through remnants of two little books that had been used to balance the rickety legs of the old piece of furniture. One was an orange book with ‘Mosetlhana’ written carelessly at the top and scratched out half way, and the other was blue with Elise’s name written in a curly child’s hand at the bottom.
“This will be good for the fire,” Elise said, snatching both books out of Karabo’s hands. She was anxious about seeing her sister knowing the bad blood between them. The last time they spoke was when her mother was buried eleven years ago. Elise refused to stay for the beer ceremony to accompany her mother’s spirit home.
Mosetlhana arrived with the setting of the sun, her little ones a row of dishevelled ducklings behind her. Karabo reached for them, but they hid their faces in the folds of their mother’s skirt. Mosetlhana yanked them by the wings and pushed them towards Elise and Karabo. The children hugged their knees awkwardly before running off with excited squeals.
Elise didn’t expect to find her sister to be in such a state. A gappy smile and old woman apron with a bottle resting in its pocket. Her once bright skin, faded. Mosetlhana almost caught her looking and Elise quickly turned away and threw more kindling on the fire. Even after years apart, their telepathy was still strong.
“Where are Mma’s pots?” Elise asked.
Mosetlhana soured immediately and tsked at Elise. “Those rusty things? I threw them out after Mma’s dinkgwana. But you missed the beer ceremony. Too busy?”
It was clear that Mosetlhana’s anger towards Elise had been brewing for years, but with Karabo, Mosetlhana was tender. She ran her hard hands over her face. “Mma-Elise ka sebele!” she said, remarking at the traces of her mother in Karabo’s face. Karabo knew she said something-something about her grandmother, but she didn’t know enough words to respond.
Mosetlhana turned to Elise, disgusted. “Couldn’t you speak Setswana to her in your England?”
Two days passed in Gopane village. Elise didn’t know how to talk to her sister about Karabo, she didn’t know how to make the ancient sorghum brew, and she didn’t know how to ask her for help.
Elise felt strangely envious when she found Mosetlhana plaiting Karabo’s hair. Her daughter hadn’t let her touch her ochre locs. She lay tranquil in her aunt’s lap, in a way that she had never been with her, so Elise sought for something to complain about. Anything. “Why didn’t you fix the roof with the money I sent you?”
Elise had been sending money home since her study days when she earned a stipend. Her father had stopped coming home after Mosetlhana’s birth. From her first day on earth as a yellow gurgling baby positioned on their plaid green and brown sofa, Mosetlhana had been a disruption. Babies come late sometimes. Mma Warona said, as Radipodi turned the baby this way and that. Elise so loved gossip that she stuck her ear to the window as she played with her new doll. Radipodi might have been a miner, but this baby wasn’t four months old. Despite Mma-Elise’s efforts, backed up by Mma-Warona, Radipodi could see that baby was brand new, born probably the previous week. Even when she tucked her curly reddish hair in a bun and tanned the freckles of her skin away, rumours still abounded in the village that Mosetlhana’s father could be the Portuguese baker who delivered loaves from Zeerust, or the visiting Roman Catholic father who had spent the Easter here, but no one knew for sure. Mma-Elise, a proud woman, crumbled under their words.
Mosetlhana took a swig from the green bottle beside her before responding to Elise, in a slow drag that said she had been drinking since morning. “It’s not just the roof, it’s the walls, the entire structure is rotting. It needs to come down.”
The thought of Elise’s childhood home disappearing made her stomach cramp painfully. Why didn’t you say anything? she asked.
Karabo got up and moved away from them as if their words were hot coals.
Why are you even here, Elise? Mosetlhana asked.
Their father passed the white house two hours later, herding goats from the mountains where they had been grazing to their kraal. He stood at the gate long enough for Mosetlhana’s children to run out to him. The children’s chatter could be heard from the kitchen, where Elise was looking through the window at him. Although still tall, her father was thin and bent at the shoulders.
Mosetlhana quickly brewed him a cup of tea.
“Father still won’t come in, but he comes by to see the children now and then.” Elise couldn’t go to her long-lost father just then. Unlike Mosetlhana, she had yet to make amends and felt pangs of envy.
Mosetlhana quickly pulled Karabo outside to where Radipodi was seated before Elise could protest. “Come and meet your grandfather.”
Elise looked on as she saw her father touch Karabo on the shoulder and face. Standing together, Elise saw they had a similar hesitant walk and hunched forward when they stood, as if to protect themselves.
The next day, Elise took out the sorghum grain and collected water and proceeded to make the beer by herself. She felt certain that she didn’t need her sister to help her. Her fire was fickle, but she set the only pot she could find on it. Seeing her father again made her want to leave. Karabo could stay with her beads and her cloths if she so chose, but she was going back to Coventry. Reacting to her fury, the porridge sputtered and burnt her on her hands and arms. Mosetlhana took over the stirring from her sister.
“You know you don’t know how to make beer, ”she said, bringing the angry porridge to a hush.
“It can’t be that hard.” Elise thought she had mastered psychiatric medicine. She could master the beer.
“Who is this child’s father, Elise?” Mosetlhana asked as she stirred. “This sangoma thing must run through their bloodline, not ours.”
Elise thought of all kinds of retorts she could throw to Mosetlhana. Growing up, Elise had feared mystical figures who lived in huts, throwing bones. It brought her shame that her daughter had chosen such a life. Elise and Mbuso had never spoken in depth about such things, but he had a brother he hadn’t known long enough before he disappeared. Instead of fighting, she pulled away from the fire, and sat on the last step of the white house. She felt exhausted. For Karabo, she had left a job she loved. She had come back home against her will.
Without invitation, the sweet, sour aroma of the beer brought villagers to the white house. The beer was brought out to be served in billy cans. The women sipped the thick, earthy, almost brown liquid, sitting on the grass mats with their legs outstretched. As the beer went into their bodies, the dead came into the yard, unseen, from Mma-Elise to the boy who asked Karabo for his grandmother. They all sat among their children, brothers, lovers. The smell of the beer alone pleased them as if they too were drinking it.
Mma-Elise stood next to Radipodi when he arrived. He hesitated at the threshold, but as Mma-Elise walked through the gate, he followed her unknowingly. He walked into the yard and moved towards the house he had built long ago.
“It needs to come down,” he said touching the hollow bricks. “But another one can be built.” He started to sketch with a stick on the red dust, the plan for the new house.
As Karabo helped serve the beer, she felt a hand touch her on her forehead, before the loud ringing in her ears and the room went black. Mma Elise knew that as spirits they weren’t supposed to touch the living, but this was her grandchild. Mosetlhana caught her niece as she fell and laid her on the ground.
Karabo woke up twenty minutes later, with a towel to quell her nosebleed. In the moment that Karabo was in a trance, she saw her two ancestral guides. First, the young boy in the black and white school uniform who hardly spoke. He took her into a veld on the border of Botswana and South Africa. The boy led her to four horn trees that stood together. With her spirit eyes, Karabo could see that he had been buried with three others who were just as young as he was.
“Show my grandmother where I am,” he said.
Karabo travelled back home-home, where she saw Mma-Elise, who proceeded to apologize to Karabo for the treacherous journey she had taken her on. Karabo didn't have a calling, except to bring her family together as blood.
The beer ceremony went on late into the night. It was a four hour stretch back to Johannesburg. “I’ll drive,” Karabo said, as she saw Elise restlessly scratching her forehead. They pulled out of Gopane village. Elise finally let her eyes close and her head rested on her child’s shoulder.
GLOSSARY
Nyala: a multi-purpose armoured military or police vehicle with anti-personnel mine, grenade, fire bomb and small arms fire protection.
Twasa: a trainee sangoma- a spiritual healer in the line of ubungoma.
Amatwasa: plural trainee sangomas
Ukutwasa: the journey of spiritual training in ubungoma.
Baloi: witches
Amagobongo: a set of medicines used to treat a person who is suffering from spiritual illnesses caused by ancestors
Sangoma: a: spiritual divination practise, based on a belief in Ngoma ancestral spirits
Solomon Mahlangu: a South African freedom fighter who was convicted of murder and hung in 1979, aged 22 years.
Mma Elisa ka sebele: the real Mma-Elisa- Karabo bore a physical likeness to her grandmother, Mma-Elisa.
Bara: Baragwanath Hospital is the largest hospital in Africa, built in 1942.
Dinkgwana: beer that is brewed for a deceased woman or matriarch, a week after burial.
Contributor Notes
Onthatile Matshidiso is a designer, writer and educator, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been a Kweli International fellow since 2022. Her debut short story “Blood Brew” looks at generational trauma, schizophrenia and ukuthwasa—the calling by ancestors to become a healer. She is working on a collection of stories and a novel.
