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Two years after a near fatal crash Sandile Dikeni shares a laugh with fellow poet Antjie Krog

‘You just don’t want to know how I felt when at first my son did not recognise us at all. I felt like my heart had just been cut by half’

Sandile Dikeni’s excavation of his memory is allowing him to re-imagine his being, writes Bongani Madondo

It’s a full two years since the raconteur, journalist and poet Sandile Dikeni was involved in a car accident that almost claimed his life.

Two years later, nobody quite remembers what really happened. The information is sketchy and the people close to him are testy, at best, whenever one searches for specifics regarding that fateful August night in the Western Cape.

Perhaps his best or worst attribute, Dikeni is the sort of person who arouses passionate reactions among his fellow beings. Those who love him do so blindly; and there are those who are intimidated by his fierce intellect and mastery of language. Those who dislike him do so with rage.

Perhaps that explains why there are varying versions of his accident. This is the closest those disparate groups agree on, also confirmed by his mom, Magdeline Dikeni: the man and a few friends, mostly colleagues from the Ministry of Housing, were returning from a friend’s mother’s funeral in Beaufort West.

Somewhere between the Western Cape and the Free State, their car collided with an oncoming vehicle in that darkest hour. Two of his colleagues and two people in the other car, died on the spot. Dikeni and one of his colleagues, both of whom were passengers, survived, but barely.

He was rushed to Pelonomi Hospital in Bloemfontein, where he fell into a coma for three days. His ex-wife, and still his closest friend, Bronia Dikeni, an air hostess, flew back from Europe and got him — heavily bandaged — transferred to Johannesburg Hospital, where he would take months to recover.

Without being oblivious to those who lost their lives on that August night, the country’s cultural circles were shaken by news of Dikeni’s accident, near death and struggle to recover. Though he was alive, Dikeni had terrible amnesia, and many mourned what they believed would be the death of his mental faculties.

Says one of his closest friends, journalist Ryan Fortune: “At first he could not remember anything, nothing at all, but it did not take too long before he could figure things out. It’s just amazing how it happened. That’s testament to the man’s strength.

“Small things,” says Fortune, “illuminated a past through which Dikeni re-imagined his world. At first it was discomfiting, but powerful, seeing it happen, to a person I have been friends with for a greater part of my adult life.”

Dikeni’s mother gets emotional just thinking about the aftermath of the accident.

“I was overwhelmed with grief. For some time I could not pull myself to go see him, when I heard about the state he was in, but you know, I thought, ‘that’s my son, uSandile wam’. I could not wait any longer. Together with Douglas, his eldest brother, I set out to Johannesburg to be with him.

“You just don’t want to know how I felt when at first my son did not recognise us at all. I felt like my heart had just been cut by half, and then something almost miraculous happened: after some days at his bedside, his brother started singing a tune they were all familiar with. It was the voice, his brother’s singing voice, that brought him back to us: he turned around, and exclaimed: ‘Oh, bra Doug, when did you arrive here?’

“Douglas ran towards me, telling me my son’s memory was coming back. I quickly walked into his ward and asked him, ‘Baby, who am I’, and he responded, quite formally: ‘I know you, I do. You are Mrs Magdeline Dikeni.’

“And that was that. My hope in miracles and belief in his fighting strength were renewed.”

At some stage, Dikeni’s memory would take him back to his journalism school days; he would think he was still a student at Peninsula Technikon.

Much later, Dikeni’s mother would tell me: “You know, I think he gets his strength from his late father. He too was a strong man, an activist, a man whose entire life was defined by his commitment to justice.”

George Dikeni was arrested in 1968 on trumped-up charges that he was a leader of activists with intentions to sabotage.

Oscar Guetirez, a Guatemalan expat who is now Johannesburg’s bohemian photographer of choice, says he is missing his old friend. The old, generous, mad, fun lover who not only enjoyed his drink but could hold court on almost any subject, anywhere on the planet, without making those congregating around and discussing with him feel any less smart.

Guetirez says: “I first met him 10 years ago when he came from the Cape to work for the SABC. The whole encounter, my friend, is still vivid. It was in Rockey Street, some jazz joint. He said to me, ‘Man, I know nobody in this town. I have nobody to speak to, can we go have fun?’ It’s funny, ’cause when I first saw him, he was talking, talking and talking some more with folk encircling, like he was an ancient story teller, but right in the city.

“We spent the following weeks moving from one jazz joint to another: he lives in the night and for the night, and so do I. So we hit it off, pretty swell. By Christmas day, we had both exhausted our money and whatever savings we had when we landed at a bar called Portal, in Troyeville.

“Dog tired and poor, I said to Dikeni, ‘Man, Sandile, do something. You are a poet, just do something. We can’t be so miserable while you are this talented. There was the usual bar noise when he climbed on the counter for an impromptu poetry performance.

“By the second poem everybody was dead quiet, and from then on he owned the house. He was terrific. Terrific. When he did Telegraph to the Sky, I swear I saw some people wiping away tears, but then again, it might have been my mind. Perhaps I was the one wiping away tears. Tears of joy, for soon after that we owned the bar: free drinks, food and more booze sent our way. You should have been there.”

Indeed, if words were bombs, Dikeni would have left many a city, many a country, many a jazz bar, flattened or smashed to smithereens. But also, this is the feeling man’s poet. Recall one of his most emotional jabs in a poem entitled A Long Story:

My comrades and friends killed my granny

With fire

But before that, they sucked her breasts dry

. . . so that she could burn well

Imagine then how devastated Dikeni’s friends were when they realised that the accident had messed with his mind, that it had affected his memory.

I, an all-too-blind fan of his work was devastated too, my thinking numbed and deadened when talk veered towards Dikeni’s health. A few weeks before that accident, I had stated in a television documentary on jazz and poetry that “together with his friend and sometimes mentor Keorapetse Kgositsile, Sandile Dikeni was possibly the closest we have to a blues and jazz poet, that, like the Chilean Pablo Neruda or the free jazz poet laureate Amiri Baraka, Dikeni was the voice that turns anger to music … for Dikeni is an eternal optimist”.

Thus, to undertake a trip to Khayelitsha to look for him was as much a personal journey as it was a labour of love.

HOUSE 86 on Maxama Street, Z Section, Khayelitsha — possibly Cape Town’s and one of the country’s biggest urban sprawls, a township with a history written in both blood and love — is just like any township structure. Until you start shaking its creaking gate and shout: “Anybody home?”

I find Dikeni with his family: mom, brother Douglas and cousins. He speaks slowly, but his fierce mind is undiminished.

“I am still writing, man,” he tells me. “But I am not going to show it to you, or anybody. Right now I am writing for myself.”

He is writing to rediscover himself, to reawaken his memory, which keeps eluding him, playing tricks with him.

He says he feels embarrassed that sometimes he bungles his owns verses and forgets his lines — but not the actual feel of his poem. Today he is not that talkative, only taking time to speak Afrikaans with his friend and fellow poet Antjie Krog, who has accompanied me.

Two days later I see him perform at the launch of his new book, Planting Water, an anthology of previously published work and poems, written early in his recovery. He is the old Dikeni, but, as Krog says, something has left the room — “it was anger that defined him”.

Most poignantly, Dikeni sometimes forgets the most potent anti-apartheid poems he penned; he simply can’t recognise them; he doesn’t remember the apartheid context which gave birth to some of his masterpieces such as Guava Juice.

Maybe another way of looking at this is that the poet is starting on a new slate, writing or rewriting his life, so to speak.

bongani madondo

this article was first published by the sunday times