The story of a man called Mayoni – e-Book

Description

… The story was about a man called Mayoni. He was one of the seasonal workers at Golden Valley… the man was an enigma. He soon became a statistic that I kept in my mind and, that being so, I developed a mental picture of the man. Some of the information I was able to put together indicated that, Mayoni was the best picker of oranges … at Golden Valley, picking more oranges than all the others and he received, every picking day, a bag of oranges as his prize. The strange thing was that he did not show any emotion as he received that prize. He would simply nod as the foreman gave him his bag of oranges. No thank you and no smile. … After work, Mayoni simply disappeared and nobody knew where he had gone to. Some workers tried to follow him but reported that they failed to complete their mission, as the man simply vanished into thin air. Many stories abounded of his character. Some workers said he actually came from the spirit world, that is why he never talked. He did not understand the language that ordinary humans like them spoke. Others contradicted that view because they always heard him mentioning his name, Mayoni. The story would change from one instance to the next and from one person to the other…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Nqakula was born at a small Karoo town in South Africa on 13 September 1942. After leaving school in 1963, he took up journalism and between 1966 and 1969 wrote a regular column for the Midland News. This weekly newspaper was printed and published in Cradock and circulated in the Midlands region, an area that covered the towns of Cradock, Somerset East, Graaff-Reinet, Adelaide, Bedford, Fort Beaufort and Middleburg. Nqakula later joined Imvo Zabantsundu (1973–76), which was based in King William’s Town, where he covered politics and sport. He left Imvo in mid-June 1976 to join the East London Daily Dispatch, but left in 1981 after being banned by the National Party government in July that year. He was a political activist involved in the underground activities of the African National Congress. At the time of his banning order, he was the Vice-President of the antigovernment Union of Black Journalists. He left the country for exile in 1984 and trained in 1985 in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. After the advent of democracy in South Africa, Nqakula became Minister of Police in 2002 and Minister of Defence in 2008 but left government after the 2009 elections.