I woke to drums. The hut was too hot to sleep soundly. I heard our translator fumbling in the dark. He lit a candle and I spoke.
“Rueben, where is the party?” I asked. “What is the party that is going on?”
“It is a ZCC thing,” he said. “Thingahangwi is there.”
Thingahangwi was Nate. Four classmates and I had been given Venda names on the first day of our homestay in the village of Maludzhawela. The rural state, Venda, north of the Kruger National Park, was part of the seven percent of South African land reserved for black Africans in the 1913 Land Act. It was relatively ignored by the apartheid government, our professor told us, and differs from other rural areas in South Africa. “It’s more like the rural parts of other southern African nations,” she said before putting us with our host families. “Like Mozambique, or Zimbabwe, where I grew up.”
In the hut, I sat up and grabbed my shoes. “Can I join?” I asked Rueben.
“Yes.”
“What’s happening?” Sylvia had woken up.
“There’s a ZCC thing down the street. The party. Nate’s there.”
“Oh, I’m coming.”
“I’m coming too,” Lynne had woken up. “Should we wake Dan?”
“Yes. Dan, wake up!”
We stood, our minds still in dreams, and went outside the hut. It was dark now that we were away from the candle. There is no electricity in this village. Children were waiting for us. In the darkness, I could not see their faces and now they wore costumes for church, caps and glinting badges shaped like stars. Our host mother, Rosina, and her grown daughters who lived with her, were not members of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) that combined African traditions with Christianity, but some of the younger children of the household were joining their friends at the celebration and they took our hands and led us out of the yard. I don’t know how they knew their way in the dark. I felt as if I were walking underwater. We went toward drums and light. The street was sand and in it dogs slept; some woke and trotted beside us. The festivities were at the house near the water tap. There were two trucks in the yard with young boys in them, and behind a pack of dancers small children curled and slept on blankets as if napping at a picnic.
In the center of the yard was a drum and encircling it on one side were men, more than I had seen during my entire homestay. Although the Venda society is patriarchal, there are very few households with male heads. Many men work away at the mines. Rosina’s daughters and their families had both fled abusive husbands, she told us. I stood with the women on the other side of the circle. They stomped in rhythm to the drum. Sometimes the men leapt with both feet in the air. They sung, chanted in Venda. Some voices greeted me by name. I said good evening in Venda, but I couldn’t see their faces in the dark.
“Lufuno, are you going to dance until three o’clock?”
I turned to the voice I recognized. It was Mavis, our next-door neighbor, a young woman who joked often and visited each evening when we danced before dinner. She was one of the few people in our village who spoke English, and she only spoke a little.
“Three o’clock?” I asked.
“Yes, this goes until three o’clock.” It was not eleven yet. I told her we may not stay until it finished, but we would stay for a while.
“You must not leave without drinking our special tea,” she said. “Tea without sugar.”
I danced as well as I could with the women and sometimes I looked up to the sky. In one long glance, I saw five shooting stars. After midnight, people began to sit down in the sand by the sleeping children. The boys rejoined us and we sat. Older children came to sit with us and young men brought buckets filled with empty teacups and into them poured the tea Mavis had told me about. The liquid was so bright I could see it in the dark, and it tasted sweet and smoky from the fire it had been boiled over. Light reflected on each shiny rim to show our faces as we sipped. My head felt strangely light the entire time, perhaps from the dead heat that never left, or the pounding of the drum, or maybe my mind still thought I was dreaming.
Sometimes the dancing would stop and a man would give a sermon in Venda. Once, he held a flaming torch in the air and whisked it around the circle. Eyes illuminated in the fire as it passed them, and once I saw a pair reflected that looked like an animal’s and in the drumming and the chants and the falling stars and milky tea on my lips, I was sure, those eyes—bright as blue flame—were a lion’s.
Rachna Reddy is a Trinity junior. She is studying ecology in South Africa for the semester. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.