He began to walk back to the village with the horse following him. ‘I thank the locusts for routing you out, you silly nag,’ said Malangana.
Malangana burst out into a belly laugh while Gcazimbane nuzzled and blew. He was obviously agitated by the sudden darkness and his tail was swishing violently from side to side. He was neighing with his head held high in search of his groom. Their folly saved the land of amaMpondomise from famine.Īt that moment Gcazimbane came cantering up. Malangana marvelled at their stupidity – invading a month before the planting season instead of waiting till the fields were green. Above him was a dark cloud of swarming locusts flying in the direction of Sulenkama. The sky had been blue all along with nary a cloud, but without warning Malangana was walking in the middle of deep shadows. Suddenly the air was filled with a strange combination of whirling and chirping and buzzing and humming sounds. Malangana did not know what direction to take so he wandered aimlessly. Gcazimbane sometimes responded by whinnying back when he thought it was time to be found. And the bounder did it on purpose, just to cause a problem for him. But who could stay mad at a fine Boerperd specimen like Gcazimbane for any length of time? He was hiding somewhere among the boulders down the hill. Malangana should have been angry, walking the wilds looking for the horse. ‘The white man’s jail has made you stupid.’
‘You can’t even look after one horse,’ Mhlontlo would say. Malangana, on the other hand, was exercised by this kind of behaviour because it was the cause of Mhlontlo’s annoyance with him whenever the king needed his horse and Malangana could not locate it. Gcazimbane enjoyed playing hide-and-seek. And then look for him when he disappeared down the gorge. He just wanted his groom to run after him. Malangana knew that it was all part of a game. He had this habit of taking off at full gallop, neighing and swishing his tail from side to side in mock irritation. Read an excerpt from Mda's 2017 Barry Ronge Fiction Prize winning novel below: Possibly most famous for the novels Ways of Dying and The Heart of Redness, Mda was the winner of the 2014/2015 University of Johannesburg Prize and is longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award – described as “the world’s richest literary award” – for his novel Rachel’s Blue. Mda’s latest work is a love story set in the early 1900s, written against the backdrop of true events surrounding the assassination of colonial magistrate Hamilton Hope in the Eastern Cape. Umuzi has shared an excerpt from the new novel from Zakes Mda, Little Suns.
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