Today’s blog post is a review of Wafarers’ Hymns, a novel written by South African novelist Zakes Mda. Guest written by Bridget Pitt.

Bridget Pitt is a South African author and environmental activist who has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and three novels (Unbroken Wing, Kwela, 1998; The Unseen Leopard, Human & Rousseau, 2010; Notes from the Lost Property Department, Penguin, 2015). Two were long-listed for the Sunday Times Literary Awards. Her second novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize (2011) and the Wole Soyinka African Literature Award (2012). She has recently co-authored a memoir of the spiritual wilderness guide, Sicelo Mbatha (Black Lion: Alive in the Wilderness, Jonathan Ball, 2021). Her short fiction has received a Commonwealth nomination and has been published in anthologies in South Africa, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Learn more at her website: https://www.bridgetpitt.com/

“We have come to mourn here because these are different deaths from those we have been used to. Death by music” (p 16)

So says Toloki, a professional mourner, who was the protagonist in Zakes Mda’s debut novel, Ways of Dying, and has appeared in many of his books since. In this book, The Wayfarer’s Hymns, Toloki has come to an area in Lesotho known as the “accordion triangle” because it has produced so many musicians in the tradition of Famo music. Famo music is characterised by the accordion, drums fashioned from metal containers and the inner tubes of cars, and “hymns” – not the religious kind, but lyrics reflecting on love, the land, war, life and death. In Sesotho, these are called difela tsa batsamai, the hymns of the wanderers, as the music emerged with the nomadic life of the migrant mine worker.  It is the music of a resourceful and creative people hard pressed by history and circumstances.

Lesotho is a tiny landlocked country of soaring mountains, sweeping valleys and desperate poverty, ironically made famous recently by President Trump’s description of it as a country “no-one has ever heard of.” Trump was decrying the wastage of sending $8 million dollars to “promote LGBTQI+.”

The aid was actually used for HIV/AIDS programmes, (which have now ground to a halt with dire consequences). As Mda says in his novel, death comes easily to these mountain communities, either from mining accidents or linked diseases, AIDS, or gang rivalries driven by the Famo musicians. Murders linked to Famo gangs gave Lesotho the sixth highest murder rate in the world in 2022.

The protagonist of this novel is a “boy child” whose name we never discover, destined to be “torn apart by vultures.” As the novel unfolds, we realise that the vultures are not the feathered kind, but the cut throat Famo gangs who threaten to eat the boy child alive.

The novel opens at the funeral of Famole, a famous Famo musician,  and the Boy child’s hero. The Boy child’s burning ambition is to reach the status of the kheleke, the eloquent one whose music and lyrics move people to dancing and happiness. He is a boy child not only in that he never underwent traditional circumcision to initiate him into manhood, thanks to his catholic mother, but also in his refusal to acknowledge the darker side of Famo music. He will not admit that his hero Famole was a member of the maRussia gangs, which flourished on the gold mines in the mid twentieth century. When he is later crowned the kheleke of a newly formed Famo group called the Cult of the Lily, he turns a blind eye to their violent activities until he and his family fall victim to the bullets that have killed or maimed so many others.

Famo rivalry began with groups competing for popularity and fame, but it took a darker turn with the rise of informal mining in abandoned gold mines. Gold mining is an intrinsic part of Lesotho culture. British colonial rulers used tax, land theft, coercion and other means to drive thousands of migrant workers into the gold mines on the Witwatersrand, and beyond. This was entrenched under apartheid, with many migrants coming from Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and within South Africa itself. Toiling deep under the earth in brutal conditions under the apartheid regime, living in bleak men only hostels far from family and community, these men turned to music for comfort and to criminal gangs for protection and access to resources.

As the mines became unprofitable in the last thirty years, the big mining houses abandoned them. Miners were retrenched, and many became  informal miners (known locally as zama zamas, “those who try”) who moved in to scrape out the gold that was left. It was not long before the Lesotho Famo gangs, with their extensive experience of mining, moved in to take over operations.

In the novel, the Boy child avoids this side of the operation, wanting only to focus on music. But he is drawn to one of these mines in search of his father’s bones. His father was killed in a mine accident many years before. The novel describes the hell of abseiling down a shaft four hundred meters deep, to a maze of underground tunnels where exorbitant ‘shops’ supply miners with food and supplies, as many miners stay underground for months at a time. The Boy child even meets sex workers who live down there to service the miners needs – and rely on the gang leaders to protect them from assault, rape and abduction. He learns how the gang bosses make profits, by directly charging the miners a fee to enter and exit the mine, as well as getting a cut of the goods sold underground, the prostitution, and any gold they manage to extract

The zama zamas have been defying  the authorities for decades, leading not only to economic losses, but also interweaving with money laundering, bribery and corruption, illicit financial flows, human and weapons trafficking, and other forms of organised crime. As with any illicit trade, it interfaces with the legal trade, relying on corrupt players within the industry and in law enforcement.

The issue came into the spot light last year as police mounted Operation “Vala Umgodi,” (“close the hole”) at Stillwater mine. Police surrounded the mine, and closed off entrances, with over 4000 miners underground. Politicians reacted with scant sympathy, with one minister threatening to “smoke them out” —a callousness partly driven by xenophobia, as most of the miners were foreign nationals. As weeks went by, friends and relatives of those underground struggled to get supplies to them. The only way out was arduous and dangerous, up a steep 2 kilometre shaft, and some were injured or killed in the process of attempting to exit. The situation dragged on for months until the Supreme Court ordered the government to assist with a rescue and recovery operation. Machinery was brought in, enabling the retrieval of bodies, and the extrication of the emaciated miners. 80 miners lost their lives. Due to the heat underground, the bodies were severely decomposed. Nearly 2000 arrests were made, including that of James Neo Tsoeli, aka “Tiger,” an alleged illegal mining kingpin and a Lesotho national. Tiger, identified by the miners as their ‘main tormentor’, mysteriously managed to escape custody. Four police officers have been charged with aiding and abetting his arrest, but he continues to elude capture.

The Stilfontein operation is a saga of sadness, with little to celebrate. It is a deeply complex story, rooted in our racially unjust past, in colonialism, in apartheid, in the extraction of gold which enriched the white community at huge expense to the workers in the shafts. Some of the zama zamas are gang bosses who terrorise local communities, others are desperately poor people, from South Africa or from neighbouring countries, trying to eke out a living in conditions of virtual slavery in the hellscape of an abandoned mine.

The Wayfarer’s Hymn, like all Zakes Mda’s books, is primarily a love story. Not only in the love between the characters, but in the profound tenderness and gentle humour with which the author reflects on the tragedy and hardship, as well as the joy and defiance, that governs life  in Southern Africa. The book gives us a lens with which to look at the zama zama phenomenon, and invites us to understand that this is not a black and white story, but one as colourful as the lefitori blankets worn by the protagonists, as nuanced and complex as the poetry of their lyrics and the harmonies of their singing, a story both joyous and heart breaking. It is a book that invites us to sit with this complexity, to absorb it and love it for what it teaches about our past, our future, and ourselves.