Desperate times at Lily Mine
Solomon Nyirenda’s cousin ‘talks’ to him every day to hasten his retrieval, writes Don Makatile
IF TELEPATHY is as real as cellphone communication, Solomon Nyerende – the trapped miner, must be speaking to Mlungisi Nyerende, who is eagerly awaiting his recovery from Lily Mine, in Barberton, Mpumalanga .
Nyerende, 22, a Grade 10 pupil at Louieville Combined School, says he speaks to his cousin all the time. “Yes, I don’t stop.”
Every day after school Nyerende goes to the mine – which is a good distance away, to join the masses of friends and family praying for the safe return of the three.
The schoolboy stays with Nyerende, the miner, at the latter’s home where his chores include preparing his lunch box. “I look after the house when he goes to work, and then cook,” says the soft-spoken young man.
On weekends, he says, his cousin would take him out for shopping trips in town “to buy groceries”.
It is clear he pines for the excursions into town and the goodies that come with the trip.
He is writing his exams and could do without the anxiety, but he is adamant the search must go on.
With the innocence of a schoolboy, he says all that’s needed is a cleansing ceremony “and they will be free”.
He says “something is keeping them down there” and all it takes is this traditional ritual.
He goes through the motions of doing what his schoolmates do, but his heart is no doubt elsewhere. “I go there every day to pray for him,” he says.
Two schoolgirls, introduced as relatives of Yvonne Mnisi, one of the two trapped women, share Nyerende’s prayers for the safe return of their kin. They rush off to be on time for the start of exams.
The other trapped woman is Pretty Nkambule.
Nyerende says shyly that he misses the lunch money he carried to school until that fateful day in early February when the mine caved in and swallowed his cousin.
He admits he had harboured ambitions to finish school and get a job at Lily Mine: “But no more.”
With the shake of his head he says it scares him witless to imagine what his cousin must be going through.
“Maybe I will be a traffic officer when I finish school. I’m done with the mine.”
Sickness and a hard life have caused Duduzile Nyerende to age well beyond her 57 years. She speaks slowly, and now and again flashes of her once brilliant mind shine through her words.
She sits forlornly outside her modest home, a stone’s throw from the gravel road that takes the heavy flow of traffic to and from Lily Mine.
This is the same home her son left from on that fateful Friday morning, more than a month ago.
Vigil
She says she will not keep vigil with members of the other families at the marquee on the mine property: “It is just too much for me to bear. It brings pictures of my child to my mind’s eye. I can’t get myself to sleep.”
Her 37-year-old son has been trapped underground for 34 days now.
“Who can we pray to? Who can help bring these children back?”
She looks straight into my eyes and it hits me this is no rhetorical question. “What is to be done now?”
She asks if I am not from the government and hastens with another question: “What do the whites say about our children down there?”
She is not well, she says. She has just eaten so she could take her medication. She has been in and out of hospital “and the clinic”.
She will not say, at least not quickly enough, what ails her, and it feels rude to probe.
She last saw to her son in December, she says. A brain wave hits her and she quickly corrects herself: “No, we spoke on the phone.”
On the day her son went to work, the mother was away in Badplaas: “We had gone to bury my sister’s husband.”
She casts her glance somewhere ahead of her, but it is doubtful if she’s focusing on any one object. “Solomon was my one great help. It is difficult without him. He was the breadwinner,” she says.
She has another child, a daughter, Nomthandazo, who had come to cook for her.
Her head is full of questions that escape her mouth even when the interlocutor would not provide the remedy she seeks. It seems therapeutic to her to keep asking, wanting to know. “How would it feel to you if your own child goes to work and never returns?”
She wants to take her pills, she says.
There is no clearer sign than that to say she wants to be alone – maybe with the torment of her thoughts.
If anyone is ever going to write a song about a mother crying for her son, this woman is the subject.
“This can affect anyone,” she says.