The Reactive, by Masande Ntshanga

The Reactive, by Masande Ntshanga. Random House Struik Umuzi. Cape Town, South Africa 2014. ISBN 9781415207192 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0719-2

In sentences which swing like nobody else's in the country, Masande Ntshanga sets out on a thrilling new expedition of writerly daring in The Reactive.

Masande Ntshanga  

Ten years ago, I helped a handful of men take my little brother's life. I wasn't there when it happened, but I told Luthando where to find them. Earlier that year, my brother and I had made a pact to combine our initiation ceremonies. This was back in 1993. He was only seventeen then. He was broad of shoulder, but known as a wimp at Ngangelizwe High. My brother was good-looking in a funny way that never helped him any, and, like me, he was often called ibhari, or useless, by the older guys in the neighbourhood, lt was bad with girls, too; most of them had decided against us pretty early. I don't know; maybe it's strange that I remember that about him most of all. I suppose my brother was handed the lousy luck of every guy in our family except our dad, who'd thrown us into different wombs one year after the other. We had cousins like that, too, all of them dealt a similar hand. In the end, it was winter when Luthando went to the hills to set things straight for himself. He went up thinking I would follow behind him. It was raining when the bakkie took him on its back and drove him up the dirt trail. Inside the camp, they put him in line with a set of boys he shared a classroom with. Then they took out their blades. Afterwards, they nursed him for a week, and he kicked and swore at them for another two. They called him the screamer, they told us later, when we gathered to put him inside the earth. Maybe it was meant with tenderness, I thought, the kind of tenderness men could keep between themselves in the hills. One morning, they said, my brother had failed to make the sounds they'd come to know him for. Luthando wasn't due out for another two days. The sky had been an empty blue expanse, easy on their duties around eziko, and they'd missed his peculiar fussiness. When they walked into his hut, one after the other, they found a memory instead of the man they were out to make. That was my little brother in there, dead at seventeen. And I've never forgotten it was me who put you there, lt. I never went back home after we buried him. This isn't a story about me and my brother from the Transkei, about the Mda boys from eMthatha or the village of Qokolweni, where my grandmother's bones lie polished and buried next to her ma's. Instead, I want to tell you about what happened to me in Cape Town after Luthando had taken his death. It's where I went to school and tried to make something of myself. It's also where I began to reconsider what my hands had made. And my telling of how it broke won't take us very long. I went to tertiary two times in my life. I might as well begin with how things went for me there. I first attended the university in Rondebosch, just up the road from the main strip. When I'd dropped out of my journalism degree, I enrolled at the technikon in town, where I got my science diploma and my sickness. [...]

This is an excerpt from the novel: The Reactive, by Masande Ntshanga.

Title: The Reactive
Author: Masande Ntshanga
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Random House Struik
Imprint: Umuzi
Cape Town, South Africa 2014
ISBN 9781415207192 / ISBN 978-1-4152-0719-2
Softcover, 14 x 21 cm, 208 pages