“Prostitutes, he was to decide, were the best type of women you’d find among all black women, unless a man wanted a man wanted to be trapped for life by a dead thing. A prostitute laughed. She established her own kind of equality with men. She picked up a wide, vicarious experience that made her chatter in a lovely way, and was so used to the sex organs of men that she was inclined to regard him as a bit more than a sex organ. Not so the dead thing most men married. Someone told that dead thing that a man was only his sex organs and functioned as such.”
Littered in works by African writers are characters and personas we find ourselves in, or not. It is their similarities to our own selves or the sharp contrast between what they are and what we are used to seeing that strike us as interesting, intriguing or confusing. One of such characters is Bessie Head’s Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather. In this prose that highlights the problem of racism, apartheid in South Africa, cultural prejudice and tribalism, Bessie Head builds for us, in Makhaya, a robust male character that we rarely find in other works by African writers. The most striking thing we notice about this character, apart from his hate for the tribalism that characterizes life as a black and tribal native, is his disgust for the belief that men are no wiser than their penises or lusts. Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather is described as handsome, so much so, women fawn over him. Worse, he is a very angry man and a fugitive who flees South Africa after planning to blow up a centre. It is now surprising that this same character loathes tribalism and would not live up to the expectations of the oldest male in the native Zulu tribe by just marrying any woman and basking in the exaggerated respect that comes with being male. For a story set in conservative and patriarchal Botswana, male characters like Makhaya in African Literature are white elephants. Makhaya is not free of shortcomings. Having lived a dark, angry and terrible life in South Africa, he builds an emotional wall around himself. He may even be "murderous" as seen when he almost attacks Chief Matenge, leader and oppressor of Golema Mmidi, the tribe he settles in upon arriving Botswana. Again, at beginning of the prose, Makhaya's character is very naive. Angered by the living conditions of blacks in South Africa where “papers are pasted on doors stating where blacks can live or not" and where the Black man is merely "a black dog", some strange and new idea convinces him that Botswana would be different. He seemingly imagines a world of utopia and does not realize that problems are not peculiar to space but to people so he goes in search of a “road that leads to the peace of mind."
"He had seen it in the slums of all the cities of South Africa where black men had to live and how a man walked out of his home to buy a packet of cigarettes and never returned and how his seemingly senseless murder gave a brief feeling of manhood to a man who had none. Thousands of men died this way..."
“…at one stage Makhaya had acquired enough hatred to become a mass murderer. He lived on this touch-and-go line with his sanity, finding nothing to stabilize him. Of course, there was the gorgeous, exotic, exuberant round of the black man’s life- his prostitutes’ his drink, his music, his warm happy laughter. Eventually he slipped into this gay, happy round of living, but not before he had had a look at the type of woman he was supposed to marry…”
In the excerpt above, Makhaya does not make a case for violence (since he unlearns the need to reply to conflict with a brawl), rather he recognizes how much the terrible conditions black men have been subjected to may affect how they see women- an escape from the dark world outside, only as useful as pain relief. Makhaya refuses to be that way.
"It was the mentality of the old hag that ruined a whole continent – some sort of clinging, ancestral, tribal belief that a man was nothing more than a groveling sex organ, that there is no such thing as privacy of soul and body…”
In many ways, Makhaya shatters the idea of male dominance and control simply because. He refuses to be called Buti or Elder Brother or be treated with exaggerated respect. When questioned he asks, "why should men be brought up with a false superiority over women? People can respect me if they wish but only if I earn it."
It is safe to say that Bessie Head creates for us in Makhaya the male counterpart of the modern day feminist that we find in works by fellow female African writers. Naturally misogynistic Bostwana has "dead women"- women who do not care to question reality and settle into loveless marriages out of necessity as it is customary. On the other hand, Apartheid South Africa creates "black dogs"-men who are born to thrill the white man and answer to his whims while living in the worst conditions on the other side of the red-taped town.
Significantly, both societies produce men who turn to traditions that make them unquestionable lords of their households for self-respect and esteem to prove their manhood after they’ve been stripped of their dignity outside by the baas and masters. It is this reality that disgusts Makhaya. He protests against the responsibilities he is forced to live up to as the man. Like the feminist who questions society’s expectations on her to just marry, birth children and be subject to the male figures in her life, Makhaya refuses to just become committed to just any woman or be regarded with false respect or puppy love. Beautifully, he extends this belief about people being people and not just beings controlled by desires extends towards how he treats the women in Golema Mmidi and everyone in it.
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