After The Burning Years: Freedom, Fugitivity and Manoeuvring Through Cemeteries of Abandoned Futures

Keynote address to a conference held at Sol Plaatjie University on Language last year

Sindiswa Busuku

Where to begin? Let me begin by saying I am terrified of you all, it seems at once rational and irrational. On the one hand, it is rational that I fear you all, because I respect and revere your work. On the other hand, it is irrational, because I know you will not physically bite or scratch me. But perhaps, it is important to sit with the fear, and begin with the fear. I live in fear.
For me, the crafting of this keynote is a fundamentally creative project. It is the creative imagination, the creative spirit that moves this now, and, much like the powerful Saint Lucian poet and playwright, Derek Walcott, “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer” (1986).
I am not a particularly religious woman. However, I am a creative writer with an overpowering interest in experimenting with poetry, prose and photography. And so, in part, this work is moved by a desire to enter into prayer with you, or rather, I am wondering whether the space of a conference can be thought of as a space of communion, an act of gathering in communion. Communion is the sharing of intimate thoughts and common feelings, especially on a mental and spiritual level.
In line with this thinking, I find myself brought back to 4,33. 4,33, a silent piece of music that lasts for four minutes and thirty-three minutes. The piece was written by the American, experimental composer, John Cage in 1952. And, as we find ourselves at a conference so deeply rooted in and concerned with language, how could we not also contemplate silence? Jorge Luis Borges, the towering Argentine poet and playwright, once famously said, ‘Don’t talk or speak unless you can improve the silence.’
As a creative writer who is invested in the archive and the loss that it represents, I find myself banging my head against so many walls of silence, daily. These walls are hard and tall, interconnected and intersecting. I wrestle with the living legacies of silence, which is to say that I wrestle with the heavy silence of those who have been silenced, and disappeared, that I wrestle with absences, exclusions, foreclosures, erasures, and gaps. I wrestle with discerning the right words and offering a language to improve the silence. And so, I have tried to craft a paper that offers that to us. I will begin with a short reading from my forthcoming experimental manuscript, titled And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness.

***

Sometimes, I think about the journey we took.
We sat on a train, seated in the middle of an overcrowded carriage, alone. Outside, it’s drizzling. The reading lamp does not work. The moon is still. A red tealight candle ignites of its own free will. The passengers, pinched, are silent. The train rattles and chugs along the sharp curve of its steel tracks, rags of smoke tatter from its blackened chimney, as ceramic plates of food and glassware tip and topple over. For three days and three nights, the radio plays the same old crackled tune, over and over again.¹ Yesterday, like today, I pressed my copper head hard against the rattling window.
The old Blue Train, salt-rusted, pushes along the steel tracks, pulls us further and further away from petrol bombed towns and cities, hot steam hissing out, as the sound of roasting baritones spills out the boiler room. From beyond the dirty window, along the harbour of the bluff, the old Millennium Tower plays hide-and-seek behind a chalking curtain of fog. The yellow collar of her spire rises and falls with the tide. Rain taps against the glass. The sky is steel-plated, muscular and charged, high above hardened industrial landscapes of grey which pass in the backdrop. There are certain things that vanished years ago, like the sound of children riding the carousel, the Cableway, Bumper Cars, Swing Boat and Tilt a Whirl at Fun World along the beachfront promenade. Out there, thousands of abandoned trucks pile up, turning pavements and parking lots into metal graveyards. There came a blur of moving shapes and colours, dockyards and ships, factories and warehouses, all deserted beyond large volumes of gas belching out bodies of water.
A little girl, found a few rows away, towards the back of the train, sits and waits and watches the sea for the bubbly build-up, for the pressure, for the high columns of steam to blast through the surface, like a hot bursting pipe. Every now and then, with each piping blast, she claps her hands and makes big whooshing sounds. Her older brother tugs her away from the window. He sat her down, smoothing out her afro-puffs, which softly sprouted out either side of her head like the flowering of baby’s breath. After that, they sat close together. She begged him to give her his half of his green Fizzer. He says no, and tells her one day she will rot her teeth.

***

Most of the libraries, schools and hospitals outside The Capital were shut down, one after the other. Squinting into the distance, I saw a trail of oil refinery towers and smoking chimneys impaling the night sky with burning flames. Beyond that, beyond the scrapyards, I saw corroded loading cranes topple back and forth, turn their backs on us, and collapse in the dust, out there, in The Killing Fields.
The windows are misty. Out there is a place, long gone. The fabric of the world is wet and heavy. I have fraying memories of the day we left, of what we left behind, five days’ worth of thread. Night after night, it feels as though I did not witness any of it with my own eyes. I watched skyscrapers and pavements burning beyond the harbour lights, beyond the heavy sea. I know now what I didn’t know then, as salt and petrol burnt through the air.

***

The train whistle sounded.
The train travels down the main line. Beside me, Mother sits in her long Shweshwe dress, and in her leather boots muddied from rain. She wears two silver teardrop earrings, and her blue Seanamarena wrapped around her body and fastened with a pin across her chest. Behind her left ear, the two small cuts are still bleeding down her neck. Father sits, across from us, in his long black coat and well-pressed pants, camera hanging loosely around his neck, reading a newspaper, in silence. He always reads newspapers backwards. And, head lilting over, he sees Mother’s neck, and, with jaws clenched, he very carefully folds his paper up to meet her eye-to-eye. Mother, looking back, chooses not to turn her eyes away from him, as Grandmother hands her a small handkerchief. Eyes red, Mother dabs at her neck and forehead, and carries on slowly eating her apple slices – pushing her glasses back up the ridge of her nose.
My little brother, cheeks punctured by dimples, head on her thighs, opens his eyes and whispers to her: ‘Are we there yet?’
The pressurised glass doors slide open, an old moustached vendor wheels by, bow tie crumpled beneath his wattle neck, glassy-eyes treading down the sooty blue carpet, down the dark, narrow corridor as an announcement on loudspeaker comes on:

ALL PASSENGERS, PLEASE STAND BY FOR ARRIVAL

To my right, in the opposite aisle, three Migrant Children sit, hands turned up, dangling their feet. Slowly, they bend forwards and backwards in their seats, drifting in and out of the rhythm of sleep. I looked at the people around me, all of us alone, together. Among the jostling strangers asleep with mouths wide open, with heads wobbling back and forth, a Woman in her late twenties is watching me from a corner, back pressed and pushed up straight against her seat, glancing at me with a reserved hand-drawn smile. The Young Woman wore woollen stockings and high heels. I waved at her, and, in a moment of uncertainty, she tugged her skirt over her knees and tightened her grip on the black briefcase she was handcuffed to.
Behind us, two men are speaking. One man called himself an Escapee, and the other an Exile. Nobody would sit near them. After a while, I looked over my shoulder to pick up stompies, to get a better look at the older man with the corduroyed face who was holding a yellow umbrella between his knees, talking to his bearded friend with the torn shirt pocket, who sat twisting and folding his train ticket into an awkward paper boat. On the other side, an old couple, a Minister and his Wife holding their black bags on their laps, sat frowning at the men for making too much noise. The Escapee and the Exile drank a lot. They were sharing something out of a brown paper bag. They talked until late. I heard bits and pieces of their traded stories. They talked about their homes, what they were forced to put behind them, what they hid in their carryovers, about what brought them here, all this battered way. They shook their heads and asked each other if they’d heard the news about the pipelines and the death rattle of the last Eskom power plants, the wyrd weather, and the whittled scaffolding of the Mining Ministry. And soon, a loud, playful argument broke out between them over the true meaning of the missing aeroplanes and trains that disappeared without a trace over the last few months.

***

Many of us passengers in the carriage sat cobbled together, fastening our seat belts, staring up, watching news reels on huge TV screens revealing events taking place in the world outside. All of us, passengers, sit alone together, watching the news on the TV screen, trying to make no noise, wiping tears from our eyes, watching live aerial footage from helicopters. Father snapped his fingers at us, listen, look, pointed up in the direction of the newsreel on the screen.
And so came images of beached dolphins and whales, hundreds of penguins washed up on the black sand of the seashore, rotting. Then came the bursting banks of the Umgeni River, as taxis and buses were swept away by heavy rains, with toddlers trapped inside, crying and screaming. And we watched mothers paddling, clutching at the water, reaching out to save their children. There was footage from different countries, Kinshasa, Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, and New Dehli, debris and coal dust bellying around mercury skyscrapers, creeping through streets and alleyways, blackening and burying petrol-bombed cities beneath a dull, dark weight. It reminded me of our mother, of all things. It reminded me of a poem that she read us years ago about a Smoke King slowly moving, towering towards something, lowering, hearsing over the land.²
There was footage of people taking matters into their own hands with the anvil and the cleaver, factory workers, traders, and shopkeepers protesting up and down Victoria Market in shirts and jeans, carrying burning flags swinging and, spiked on metal poles, whose daily lives burnt down little by little, along with the flag. We were afraid when we saw the close-up shots of silent protesters in balaclavas fade in, when we witnessed protesters gathered in all major city centres around the world, protesters who carried signs that read:

“THE WORST IS OVER, THE WORST IS YET TO COME”³

***

“Are we there yet?” The child whispers to the mother.

And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness is a story stalked by the crisis of Black histories and futurities within current South African cultural imaginaries. In this paper, I am trying to find a language to speak of Black futurities precisely because we live, at least in my opinion, in a time where “we are haunted by futures that failed to happen”, as Mark Fisher writes (2014). (Again . . . I am trying to find a language to speak of Black futurities precisely because we live, at least in my opinion, in a time where “we are haunted by futures that failed to happen”.) This is perhaps the driving force of my writing over the past few years. As a creative writer and literary scholar, artistic and creative inquiries are always undertaken as forms of research, linking theory and practice.
As a writer, I often feel bereft of language and destitute of words when attempting to articulate our histories and futures. Can we craft a language that can speak of how we find ourselves living in what theorist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2017), once described as “cemeteries of abandoned futures”? How might we utter what it means for us to all variously bear “futures murdered at birth, or even still-born futures”?
I know this perhaps sounds terribly despairing, defeatist and fatalistic. I would like to challenge such simplistic notions. I do not desire to deliver a keynote that feels pessimistic. In fact, I placed a great deal of pressure on myself to offer a distinctly hopeful and optimistic paper – but I want to be honest about my journey as a writer. At all times, this thinking wrestles with feels and sensations that I find ineffable, that cannot be described or expressed. I am wrestling with and made restless by language.
Perhaps the French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, Maurice Blanchot understood the unbearable restlessness of writing best. Blanchot offered a keen — if subtle — paradoxical insight when he wrote, “to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely” (110). This tension rings true for me.

***

“Are we there yet?” The child whispers to the mother.

In And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, and in this poetic paper, this prayer, this communion, I am compelled by my concern for and about our people. I am thinking about mass surveillance, global immigration and refugee situations, and asylum, exile, and fugitive policies. I am thinking about how we, as fugitives, refuse to be conquered and dominated by what the German sociologist, Max Weber, borrowing from Friedrich Schiller describes as a grim “disenchantment of the world” (REF). And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, suggests that our creatively-critical and critically-creative work calls for us, who are interested in abolitionist futures and imaginaries, to labour towards a reenchanting the present and future. This is perhaps best articulated by what my late colleague, Prof Harry Garuba describes as a “continual re-enchantment of the world” and “laying claim to what in the present is yet to be invented” (REF).
In the writing of, And, In Those Honeyed Regions of Darkness, how we move and manoeuvre whilst being stalked and haunted, is a way of affectively thinking through liberatory and emancipatory imaginaries, or what Robin D.G Kelley calls “freedom dreams” (2002).
This ongoing work is an inquisitive form of meditation and/or speculation. And so, I suppose it began with a question that I have been wrestling with for several years, and one that continues to relentlessly confront me throughout my PhD. The acclaimed poet, critic, and theorist, Fred Moten. once asked, “What does it mean to suffer from political despair when your identity is bound up with utopian political aspirations and desires?” Moten’s question has never left my mind. It challenges me, keeps me awake at night, and I feel these reflections ask a similar question.

***

That said, I have no clear answers for Moten, only questions that lead to more questions. When thinking through abolitionist imaginaries, there are, of course, no easy answers. It is perhaps an aporia between the seen and the unseen, an aporia between the creative and the critical.
I learned to separate the creative and critical imagination. I have worked to unlearn that binary; this, for me, is a part and parcel of abolitionist imaginaries. Abolitionist imaginaries undermine and unsettle normative conceptions of what the ‘critical imagination’ and ‘creative imagination’ are forced to be and mean. I believe abolitionist imaginaries are always-already fugitive, they resist the standing social order, they refuse to be captured in the stranglehold of what Trinh Minh-ha describes as the “rein of worn codes” (1989: 47). Our abolitionist imaginaries are interested in the suggestive possibilities that can emerge.

¹ A song by Zim Ngqawana, a song called Qula Kwedini, repeated over three days, over and over.
² In 1985, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, ‘I am the Smoke King / I am black! / I am swinging in the sky, / I am wringing worlds awry’ in a poem entitled “The Song of the Smoke”.
³ Carolyn Forche

Joshua Omeke is a Poet, storyteller and performer of Arts. He has been invited to perform at LSE Firoz Lalji Institute Ubuntu Café, has been featured on Kirkus review and was accepted for a nomination at the Forward Prize.

BALONDEMU: THE CHOSEN CONQUEROR

“A short fiction on Ugandan folklore about resilience and redemption”

In the ancient kingdom of Buganda where the Bantu tribe resides, there roamed a joyous woman named Nantale, who fell for the charms of a native hunter whose name was Dembe. The couple united in the consecration of their families— engaged in native rituals for sustenance and sought an abode in the Mountain of Elgon through Bugisu in Buganda. They dwelled in harmony amongst the villagers aside from a wicked king of snakes that sought half of everything anybody earns.

When people failed to adhere to his demands, he would send his guards with massive snakes to attack the dwellers of Bugisu. On a particular day, Dembe was fed up giving half of his daily struggles, and rebelled against the king of snakes. And though his pregnant wife, Nantale, pleaded with him to comply with the snake king’s demands to avoid trouble, Dembe stayed stubborn.

After the sun had set, and the king of snakes still had not seen Dembe’s daily tax, he grew furious, and sent his goons to Dembe’s hut. But Dembe resisted and fought them off with arrows. This caused a commotion in the village by giving the impression that the king of snakes was soon to be conquered by a redeemer.

The king of snakes sent back the goons who had escaped from Dembe; again with bags of venomous snakes. They opened the sacks into the window of his hut, and the snakes attacked Dembe and his wife. Dembe died shortly and Nantale sustained deep injuries.

Their next-door neighbour, Amina asked her sons, Amari and Dakari, to take Nantale to the forest and chant for the spirits of Kintu and Kibuka to help her. The spirits appeared, and Kintu gave her a mystical potion, while Kibuka provided love and attention so that she could reach a full recovery.

In the lunar month when the moon swallows darkness. Nantale’s water broke, and she delivered a boy who was named Balondemu, who was raised by Kibuka as the spirit of Kintu paid its annual visit.

Nantale was as strong as a lioness, and wise as an old owl. She was waxed with nature and brought knowledge of Dembe’s death to the hearing of Balondemu who heard more tales about the king of snakes, a fearsome ruler that terrorized the kingdom of Buganda.

Balondemu felt destined to confront this mighty foe and succeed but was wise to seek guidance and training, but his mother Nantale could not provide this. In the coming evening, she sent him to Kibuka the old warrior who fell from the surface of earth and helped her recover in the forest.

Kibuka was moved by the bravery of Balondemu and enclosed him under his wing. Together, Kibuka and Balondemu embarked on a quest to train for the battle ahead. The days went by and Balondemu had learned how to use numerous weapons.

Under the watchful eyes of Kibuka and a visit from Kintu, the hunger for vengeance in Balondemu became fuel for strength. He learned the secrets of the King of Snakes, developed tactics to lace his agenda, and grew endurance to resist venoms and pain. Balondemu had been pronounced very strong, and set to attack the King of Snakes to deliver his village from the riddance of an evil ruler.

As soon as the day of resistance had come, the festive of Nyege Nyege when the King of Snakes would be least expectant of an attack as the people would be celebrating. Balondemu, walking with years of preparation in his mind, ventured into the palace of the King of Snakes with an unwavering determination to conquer.

A battle erupted Nyege Nyege festival, as Balondemu used his skills and magical knowledge of the King of Snakes’ weakness to strike at him. After a long struggle, Balondemu emerged victorious, forcing the King of Snakes into exile because of his defeat and bringing redemption to the doorstep of the kingdom of Buganda.

The villagers rejoiced because their dreams had come to pass and thanked Balondemu for his bravery and strength. Amina had passed but her sons Amari and Dakari recognized Nantale and thanked her for her son’s heroic accomplishment.

The tale of Balondemu: the conqueror, became a legendary saga of courage, guidance, and the triumph of good over evil. It reminded the villagers of the power of unity and the strength that can be found in unexpected friendships.

Extract from the novel: The Home We Built by Betty Phanzu

Y2K and a wasted date

Thomas was a young man from a well-established family in the heart of Lubumbashi. During his first year in the active life as an architect, he quickly realized the loneliness of the rise and grind and felt ready for a relationship. Luckily, his brother’s girlfriend Patricia had just the plan for him: a hot date with one of her friends on New Year’s Eve.
On the big day, his uncle Thierry stopped by and joined the family of five for lunch.
“Why don’t you tell us how you met the love of your life, Tonton Thierry?” asked Thomas.
Perhaps that would inspire him for his evening rendezvous.
The reason for Thierry’s visit was business-related, and soon everyone left the two brothers to it.
Looking at the clock—one in the afternoon—Thomas freshened up, then sat at his desk to study old models from Fernand Tala-Ngai’s portfolio, a renowned Congolese architect. His mind was still set on the hotel he kept dreaming about. Suddenly, the previous night’s dream came back to him: a woman with the softest features, brown skin with a glimmer, jumping out of one of the golf carts at his hotel. She looked at him, smiled, then looked away while a clerk attended to her equipment. He wanted to offer her a refreshment on the house, but alas, Caro and Freddy had to wiggle the entrance gate so loud it woke him up earlier that morning.
While examining old portfolios, he came across the previous week’s newspaper. Since the nineteen seventy-seven eruption of the Nyiragongo, the reconstruction of the region of Kivu had orbited around sustainability. Dry lava moulded into bricks could offer excellent insulation for houses—an innovative take born from unfortunate events.
“What about the population?” he thought. “We’d make money off someone
else’s misery… with something they wouldn’t be able to afford.”
The material, though expensive, would be durable—and perhaps he could source it for the building of the hotel he had yet to name.
At 5 p.m., his red shirt was ironed, and he knocked on Jean-Paul’s door.
“Hey, what time did Patricia say I was meeting her friend? Tanya, am I right?”
“It’s dinner—I’m pretty sure she said seven. You’ve got her picture, don’t you?” Jean-Paul replied.
“Yes, yes I do. Are you okay?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter really,” Jean-Paul said, his face toward the ceiling with a hopeless look all over it.
“Is it Mom?”
“She came in earlier. It was like talking to a wall. But I’m not the only one who sees it, right?”
Thomas closed the door behind him and leaned against it, facing his brother.
“No, you’re not. She’s a bit odd when Pat comes over.”
“That’s what I told her. She said she doesn’t know what I’m talking about and that if Patricia doesn’t care to respect her in her own home, she’s not welcome here.”
“That was not necessary…”
“I don’t know what to do,” Jean-Paul said with a sigh.
“Remember how Grandad wouldn’t let Dad sit in his living room after the incident? Do you think it’s something similar?”
“You can’t compare the two! Pat hasn’t done anything—that’s the difference.”
“Give her time,” Thomas said calmly. “She’ll grow out of her feelings.”
Jean-Paul sighed again, closed his eyes, and changed the subject.
Soon enough, Thomas was starting his Toyota, on his way to wine and dine a woman who looked nothing like the woman in his dreams.
At the Park Hotel, a small band was playing something from Papa Wemba’s newest album.
…Pesa ngai mbote, nga na yo likambo te, pesa ngai mbote, nga na yo binemi te…
It was quarter past seven and she still hadn’t shown up.
The bar was vibrant—each table covered in a blue and purple African print, umbrellas hovering above just in case of rain. He looked down at his watch, up at the band, then down again at the patterns.
“And for the handsome man, what can I bring?” the waitress cheerfully asked, interrupting his train of thought.
“Good evening,” he replied calmly. “Nothing for now, haha. I’m waiting for someone.”
“No problem—just wave when you’re ready.”
Shortly after, he saw her: black thin heels, a lavender midi dress, a matching
handbag, and her relaxed hair gelled into a low ponytail with some black extensions. She walked gracefully toward him. He recognized her from the photo—only she was much thinner now. He stood to greet her and kissed each of her cheeks, as was custom. She smelled of amber.
“You look so much like your brother,” Tanya said. “If it weren’t for the beard, I’d think you were twins.”
“Except I would be the handsome twin,” Thomas replied playfully.
She let out a nervous laugh, and an awkwardness was cast over them.
“So… what do you do?” he asked.
“I am a chemist during the week, and I lead my church choir on the weekend.”
“Brilliant! I am an architect.”
“That’s lovely”, she smiled, waiting for him to flirt with her.
Sometimes she’d look at the band, sometimes she’d look at her nails, freshly done, sometimes she’d readjust herself in her seat.
“It’s a full moon tonight,” Thomas tried.
“Yes”
“What would you like to drink? I was thinking of ordering some wine for the table?”
“Oh, I can’t…early morning…”
“My apologies, how inconsiderate of me. Perhaps you’d like a Djino?”
“Water for now.”
Thomas gestured to the waitress, who ran up to them, bouncing her generous chest.
“Has the handsome man decided himself?”
“Yes please, a glass of coke for me”
“And for his plus one?”

She did not call her beautiful, in fact she barely acknowledged her, eyes fully set on Thomas, who was staring back.
“Uhm, may I have a glass of water with lemon in it?”
“And anything to eat?” the waitress insisted.
“Fries and a Greek salad.”
“No meat?” asked Thomas.
“No meat,” she said.
“Well for me, a rib eye steak, well done, with mashed potatoes and mushroom sauce, *please*”
“Coming right up for Mr. and Mrs.,” the waitress said, taking their orders.
“With all those onions, I hope she’s not expecting a kiss at the end of this date” he thought. Thomas was bored out of his mind. His date did not reciprocate his questions, did not ask about him, showed little interest in the band playing, and did not even notice what he was wearing. “I couldn’t care to see her again, but she needs to walk out of here liking me at least a little bit” he thought to himself.
He noticed her nails were dark blue and glossy, perhaps freshly done. Her low ponytail accentuated her cheekbones, and her lip outline covered with shiny balm did make her appealing. She was beautiful, but maybe the lavender dress was not for the occasion. “What’s wrong with her? “he asked himself. Her complexion was a deep brown, and he thought to himself, that maybe richer colors would brighten up her face, because the pastel on her eyelids washed her out…
“That’s a lovely color on your nails, let me see,” he said, extending his hand to her.
He gently stroked her hand, playfully observed her fingers, then rested it on the table, still holding it. She was looking at him and his chance to impress her was now or never, so he started singing along with the band, loud enough for her to hear him from across the table. He knew the lyrics after all.
“You’re a tenor,” she calmly said.
“Am I? And yourself? What are you?”
“I’m a soprano.”
“And how long have you been singing?”
“Since I was little.”
“That’s very young!”
“Some would say, yes.”
“And besides the choir, what do you like to do for fun? Do you dance?”
“Only at church.”
“Any sports?”
“Not since high school.”
She was did not seem like she wanted to be there and Thomas could unfortunately sense it.
“Hard nut to crack” he thought. But he liked the challenge.
“Do you have siblings? What is your family like?”
“I have four siblings, I am the second born, and the only girl.”
She was brief, almost cold. Thomas thought he might not be the only one asking her out. What was it? The genre of music? The Park Hotel? The weather?
“What’s going through your mind?” he asked, pretending to care at this point.

“Nothing, I’m just a bit hungry…”
“What do you usually like to eat?”
“Pasta, but nothing fills you up like our own dishes!”
“Tell me about it!” he responded, hopeful this would be the beginning of an animated exchange.
“Also…I’m not a big fan of the Park Hotel…” she finally admitted.
“Why? What happened if it’s okay to ask?”
“I’d rather not say…”
‘ ’Hear me out: let’s have a little bit of our food, and I know a place that makes excellent Mitshopo and doesn’t smell like a dump. What do you say? I could drive you home after?” Thomas confidently suggested.
“No, we’re already here, we might as well stay.”
He looked at his watch, five minutes to nine. In truth, Tanya was enjoying playing hard to get. She had very little interest in Thomas, and loved watching him try so hard.
Shortly after, the waitress showed up with their food.
“I’d like a glass of red with it please, what would you recommend?” he enquired.
“We serve a good Merlot, but you seem to me like a Pinot Noir kind of guy. They both hold a very strong taste.” The waitress was flirting with him.
“Which one is your favorite? I’ll go for anything a woman as sweet as you would recommend.”
“Well, I personally enjoy the Tâche Noire to be specific”, the waitress responded, blushing.
He could sense Tanya frowning on the other side of the table.
“Tâche Noire it is then.”
The waitress giggled.
“Sorry I did not ask for your name?”
“Sarah, she responded.”
“Beautiful”, he briefly added, winking at her.
And she ran away with his order, bringing back a glass in one hand, and a bottle in the other. She slowly poured it in Thomas’ glass, her shirt unbuttoned to the fourth this time.
Thomas swirled his glass, smelled the wine’s aroma, took a sip, then raised his eyebrows.
“Pretty good.”
He nodded, then looked away at the band, Tanya still silent, staring at her nails, then crossing her arms. Why did Thomas stop trying? “Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all” she thought to herself, after feeling a wave of jealousy at his exchange with the waitress. Finally, he slowly extended his arm to her. This was his last chance.
“Do you want to dance?”
“No thank you, I am fine.” Tanya responded, shrugging.
“That’s what I thought. Definitely not my type” Thomas thought. As she checked her phone for the fourth time, Thomas felt something shift. He had tried (he really had) but the truth was settling in, slow and cold: he was more invested in this moment than she was. And nothing was more unattractive than indifference. He took another sip of his wine, unphased, as if he anticipated her response. The waitress enjoyed his banter earlier, surely nothing was wrong with him. Perhaps Tanya had a particularly hard day and could not get her thoughts to a different space. It was 9:50. The band was done playing and the kitchen was closing in ten minutes. Any additional minute spent there felt like torture for them both. He excused himself, discreetly handled the bill and made his way back to his table.
“Would you like me to take you home?”
“Sure thing. My house is near the Saint Elizabeth Church.”
She seemed cold, so he brought his jacket over her shoulders, which she did not fight against. On their way to his car, one of the photographers who usually offered to capture beautiful moments tried his luck with them, but Thomas was quick to brush him off. There was nothing about tonight that he would want to immortalize on the red-carpet of the Park Hotel stairs.

The ride to Tanya’s house was quiet, so he turned on the radio. The new year was only in the next two hours. He changed stations a few times, until he stumbled on one that played something he enjoyed. Sometimes he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, following the rhythm of the bass, sometimes he was looking at his watch, and other times, he was looking at Tanya, who stared out of her window during the entire ride. “A bit entitled, I suppose” he thought again. But he was a gentleman and committed to the date until she safely entered her parents’ house. Before driving off, he phoned Eddie, his best friend, who was about to head to the club to meet up with Charles and some old pals.
“22h e beti kutu te, c’est que e lekani bien te?” (It’s not even 10pm, it didn’t go well did it? )Eddie playfully said.
“Soki na bandi ko betela yo lisolo’yo, batu bako mi yamba bonne année, kutu to silisi te. Position?” (If I start to tell you this story, people will be shouting happy new year and we still won’t be done. Where are you?(
“Ko lemba te, yaka to kutana na de la révolution.” (Don’t bother then. Let’s meet by de la Révolution.)
“Probleme te, na zo ya kasi.” (No problem, I am on my way.)
And he drove like a mad man to join his friends and clear his head off this awful night. The club was vibrant, red, blue and green lights were flashing on the ceiling, while everyone enjoyed the music, and the drinks flowed. The year was nineteen ninety-nine. Not a single soul was worried about the end of the world. Before he noticed, the clock struck two minutes to midnight and the screen showed a sixty second countdown that would begin shortly. Soon enough, sixty went down to thirty, which went down to twenty.
15…14…13…12…
Eddy stood up, wrapped his left arm around Thomas while a short waitress brought a third round of Simba for the table.
10…9…8…7…6…
Thomas felt dizzy, as if his legs were about to give up. Everything around him became blurry, and a whistling sound was shooting from his right ear.
5…4…3…
As the clock struck midnight, his tall body collapsed, his knees hitting the floor first. Charles, his other friend, who was always alert, hurried to catch him and check his heartbeat.
“Benga Jean-Paul!” (Call Jean-Paul! )he screamed to Eddie.

The music was still playing. A crowd gathered around his body laid in a fetal position by Charles on the floor.
“He’s breathing well, do not panic.”
The waitress who brought around more beer earlier, hurried with a wet towel, which the faithful friend placed on his head.
Shortly after, Jean-Paul, Charles and Eddie threw Thomas on the backseat of his car while JP drove home.
Charles and Eddie, left behind, wondered if it was the wine he had before that perhaps caught up to him. “What a way to start off the year” they both thought, worried about their friend, but happy he was safe. Thomas woke up the next morning hungover, but glad to be in his own bed.
“Happy New Year, my darling!” his mother said, leaving a kiss on his forehead when he joined the family for breakfast. The world did not end. In fact, the year felt like a new beginning for him.

Cake

By

Jade Campbell

I did not know him, but I liked the way he could make himself cry. I felt I knew him when he did, and that he knew me too.
He played the role of a wronged husband. At a small table in the dim light, the woman pretending to be his wife admitted to sleeping with another man and something inside of him curled up like a hurt animal on a roadside alone. I saw it happen. As she told him what she had done, his body tensed against the injury and I thought about how, if my hand had been there, pressed flat against his stomach, I would have felt his muscles tighten.
She had been away somewhere, I don’t remember where, and he had made her a homecoming cake. It was white, with sprinkles, and it sat between them in the middle of the table. They spoke over it and its presence there was tragic.
“What did I do wrong? What did I do?” he asked her and then the audience. He had a plaintive look, and I wanted to hold him, to stroke his hair and press my lips against his ear.
The theatre was small, and I had never been before. I was still uncertain of the wideness of this city and the way it seemed so full of people that I worried they would rub against me on the street. I had expected it to be quieter, less crowded. The reality made me jumpy, but I remembered what my mother had said about not hiding like a little rabbit in a hole. So, I had gone to the theatre.
“It wasn’t your fault,” the woman said, but he didn’t believe her. He stood and walked slowly around the table like a creature, caged. I watched him and I noticed, suddenly, that he had a limp. It was so subtle that it could not be pretended. He walked like a person without a limp, but still, I could see it. He was trying to conceal it, I realised, and I leaned forward in my chair. I could feel my heart. The limp was not a part of his character; it was him, and I had seen it. I looked hard at him. I wanted him to look at me.
He paused behind his chair. His fingers gripped the wooden slat and traced the patterns of the grain unconsciously. He looked at his wife, and then down at his hands, and then pulled out the chair to sit.
“Julie…” He spoke softly, reaching out his hand across the table to her. She would not look at him or take his hand. “Julie, please.”
For a long moment, he stayed there, hand outstretched. His stomach was pressed against the table’s edge where he leaned towards her. I thought about how I would like to put my hand between him and the table, to soften the pressure there and feel the movement of his breathing.
When Julie stood, he looked up at her like a child. He watched her leave and then lowered his head to the table quietly. With one cheek pressed against the wood, his face was distorted, and he closed his eyes and began to cry. A tear rolled slowly over the bridge of his nose and dripped to the table. Others slid down the valley of his cheek and onto his lips and into his mouth. I thought about how he could taste them, right at that moment. It didn’t matter if he was acting; there were tears in his mouth. The thought of it gave me goosebumps.
The audience was silent. Somewhere offstage, the girl who had been Julie was undressing. I watched his face, and I wondered if he had ever kissed her, or wrapped his arms around her after a show. I wondered who had put that powder on his face, and who had tied his tie in that sad way, and I felt a painful lurching in my chest.
But then he opened his eyes and looked at me. They were red and they were the saddest thing I had ever seen, and I knew at once that he was looking at me from beneath his character. I felt his gaze on my skin; it was like he was pushing against me, trying to get in. A few tears still clung to his eyelashes. I wanted to lick them away. I opened my mouth to speak to him, but in that moment, he turned from me, looking out across the audience and back to the table, where his eyes settled on the cake.
He rose slowly, wiping his face with the back of his forearm, and used a knife from the table to cut a single piece. He grazed the icing with his fingertips as he moved the slice onto a side plate. Then, holding it with both hands, he walked to the edge of the stage and lowered himself to his knees and held the cake out towards me. I took it, and the room went dark.

When the lights came back on, he was standing in the centre of the stage with Julie. I hadn’t heard him move. I had thought I felt him close in the dark. The unreality of it dizzied me. In the moment of silence before the applause, I saw him take Julie’s hand. I remember that he didn’t have to look for it. His hand moved through the air at his side and closed around hers as though he could feel the weight of it in the space between them. They bowed twice and as the curtain closed in front of them, I saw him lift his free hand to her mouth and I saw her lick the icing from his fingers.
I left the side plate on my chair and pushed out into the night. In my hand, the cake squished between my fingers and bits of it fell as I walked. I dropped the lump of it under the nearest tree. Let the squirrels have it.

On the train I sat in the corner. I was not used to them yet: trains. The whole project of them overwhelmed me. The planning and the laying of tracks and the manufacturing of parts and the timetabling. And then there was the proximity to strangers and the sickly-sweet sense of sharing something with them as we travelled the same routes.
In the carriage with me there was only a man. He wore a light blue work shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and was sitting about halfway down the carriage. He was facing towards me so that the scenes through the window rushed past from behind him. I found the strangeness of it endearing. Who would choose to face the wrong direction on a train? Perhaps it was linked to a fear of some sort, I thought, a weakness of constitution that was triggered by the onslaught of the world as it crowded towards him through the glass.
He struck me as a gentle man. He had glanced up at me when I walked in, but then quickly down again at whatever he was holding in his lap. Maybe a book, I thought. I liked that. But as I watched him, I could tell he was not reading. His eyes were settled on one spot, and did not move.
I sat forward in my seat, trying to better see his face, but it was angled down in a way that obscured most of it. Unmistakably, though, his eyes were still. My fingers were sticky with icing, but I put them on the back of the seat in front of me and leaned closer. Maybe the motion of the train made him feel sick, I thought. Maybe he was also unsettled by them. Maybe he had come from far away, like me. Or maybe he could feel me watching. If he could, he was staying still so that I wouldn’t look away. I was certain.
I wanted him to know that it was okay, that I understood him. He didn’t know it yet, but he understood me too. But I needed him to look at me. I kicked the wall of the train hard. The sound of it echoed through the carriage and the man looked up and directly at me. He looked uncertain, almost afraid, and his eyes flickered from me at first, but when I kept looking, they returned to me, and I held them there with my gaze.
We stared at each other then, and I knew that in that moment I was alive to him in a visceral way, more alive than anything else in the world, so alive that I had curled up inside of him and he would feel me there forever. I felt the tears well in the corners of my eyes and roll warmly down my cheeks. I opened my mouth to taste them.

Cathy’s First Time 

Thabiso Tshowa

*(This story, though fictional, was inspired by true events.)*

Before we go anywhere, I want to say, please don’t judge me, because peer pressure is one fickle mistress.
My name is Cathy Molawu, and this is my story.
You know that girl, at the school nurses’ office, sick and crying? Knowing she might be pregnant…at age 16…
Well, that’s me right now. But it’s all his fault. That handsome, silver tongue devil, with glowing dark skin, long dreadlocks and a mouth full of platinum teeth.
I can’t believe I fell for his charm! This is so unlike me. I am a straight A student, who found herself in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

                                                       ***  

It’s a cold Saturday morning. We’re attending extra classes at school.
I sit in my desk absent mindedly. I whisper under my breath. “I am off today. Where’s my focus? Perhaps I am thirsty!”
I excuse myself from class and head straight for the senior girl’s bathrooms. It’s closer.
“Is that a cigarette I smell?” I say, walking into the bathroom.
I walk in and find two grade eleven girls, sharing a cigarette. They spot me and I run. My efforts are futile, because they catch me, and drag me back into a filthy bathroom stall.
Cindy grabs me by the neck, “Ready to swim? Little birdie!”
Babes lifts up the toilet sit, “Perhaps, we caught ourselves a pelican.”
Cindy, chuckles, “I heard those are waterproof. We’d better flush twice. Just to be certain!”
Babes, compels me to my knees, “I swear. I am not a snitch. I won’t tell a soul.” I cry out, hopelessly.
Babes loosens her grip, “So you’ll smoke with us?”
I am scared, so I try to fit in. I don’t wish to get dunked in a dirty toilet, so early in the morning.
I nod.
Babes lets me go. Cindy is a bit reluctant.
I get up from the wet floor.
Babes hands me a lit cigarette.
I take a drag and almost cough out my insides.
Babes, chuckles, “Virgin lungs!”
We all laugh.
By my 3rd cigarette, it’s not so bad anymore. I actually, kinda like it. I ask for another cigarette, “Hey, Cindy, may I have another one?”
She shrugs her shoulders, “I’m out. We have to go get more from Don, at the football field. That’s his usual spot.”
“Who’s he?” I ask
“Only the coolest boy in matric. He sells ‘Candy’ if you catch my drift.”
“Huh, Candy?”
Babes rolls her eyes at me, “Yes, candy, hau Cathy. You really want her to say cigarettes and zol? What are you, a snitch? Come on virgin lungs, keep up!” she exclaims.
I smile, “Oh, I see…”
Cindy takes me by hand, “Let’s not waste time. ‘Fresh blood’. Don, will definitely love you!”

Tell Us: Have you ever been bullied into doing something you didn’t want to do?”

We get to the football field, there’s a group of boys sitting, huddled together, playing Ludo for money. We walk closer and a tall, smooth-dark-skinned, sweetheart with dreadlocks and thick luscious lips stands up.
“Ladies, mantombazan’. Welcome to my kingdom. I’ve been dying for your visit!”
Cindy smacks her thigh, “You know it, lover boy! Oh, I brought you a gift. Fresh from the farm!” she exclaims.
He creeps up on me like a thief in the night, “Hey, baby girl. I am Don, what’s your name?”
“I am Cathy Molawu.”
Don smiles, flashing his platinum teeth, “Pretty name, for a pretty girl.”
“Nah, you’re just messing with me.”
He pouts, “Would these lips lie?”
I blush, “No…”
He takes me by hand, “come join me in paradise, for a few smokes and perhaps we’ll share a bud.”
I gasp, “You mean, smoke zol? No way, I’ve never done that before. This is my first time smoking cigarettes.”
Don says, “Oh, yeah? I thought you were a pro.”
I look down at my feet, “No, Don, I am just petite.”
He smiles, “That’s not what I meant. I mean because you’re rolling with the usual culprits; Cindy and Babes.”
I chuckle, “Eish, silly me!”
Don gives Cindy a fresh pack of cigarettes and a bag of zol, “Be careful. This is Swazi-gold. Not for the light-headed.”
He grabs me by my slim waist, “Asambe Slender.”
“What about them?”
He sneers, “These old hags? Please! Besides, they got what they came for.” He pauses and turns to Cindy and Babes, “Or kanjani ladies, mantombazane…”
They both giggle and walk away.
Don leads the way, “Woza Slender. Ungasabi. I won’t bite.” He says with a charm.
I follow him past the boys huddled together, playing Ludo. He takes me to the end of the football field.
We sit, talking. Getting to know each other.
Don rolls a joint, “So, Cathy, tell me. What’s the wildest thing, you’ve ever done?”
I look away shyly, “Smoke a cigarette.”
Don chuckles, “Oh, yeah? You’re bad to the bone, aren’t you?”
We both laugh.
He hands me the joint, “How about today, we work on keeping up with this bad girl streak. It suits you.”
I smile, “Oh, yeah? You reckon…”
“Hell yeah!
While smoking the joint, Don frantically gets up from the grass, “Oh, shit. I forgot my Math study guide. Will you accompany me home to fetch it? We’ll be back before anyone even notices we’re gone.”
I gasp, “Are you sure?”
He nods, “Of course. I do this all the time.”
“OK. But is your house far from here?”
Don shakes his head, “it’s a thirty minutes-walk to Ekurhuleni. Don’t worry, we’ll hitch a ride.”
Every cell in my body is telling me no. but then again, I don’t wish to chicken out in front of Don – the coolest guy in school. And boy, oh, boy, is he cool. We all wear the same uniform, yet he rocks his way better than the boys at school. Plus, his tight pants show off his butt; leaving you wondering what he looks like naked.
I agree.
We sneak out of school. And we walk on the main road, at Welasi, Ext4. We’re on the sidewalk. Suddenly a random white Quantum, headed the same direction as us, stops at our feet.
The Driver says, “Ekse Don, uphethi Slender? Khwelani!”
Don reaches for the door, “Thanks Mageza.”
Mageza turns to Don, “Zalo, there’re ice cold beers in the cooler box.”
Don reaches under the seat and takes out two Savannas from the cooler box. He opens one and hands it to me.
Looking at the Savanna I say under my breath, “Oh, Lord! What have I gotten myself into? Just for his attention.”

Tell Us: Have you ever fallen victim to peer pressure?

Don’t take me wrong, I’ve always resented those girls from school, ‘Taxi skanks,’ we call them. They trade a good time for sexual favours. That alone has deprived fourteen-year-old girls of their virginity in Mrova.
I feel like one of them. Now that I am having a close and personal experience, I feel different.
I say, “I feel like, I am on top of the world.”
Don caresses my hand. I reciprocate, “Thanks, Don, you really know how to make a girl let loose and feel special.” I exclaim.
Don smiles and reaches for the cooler box, “Here you go Cathy. Have yourself another cold one.”
We slowly keep dowsing down the beers while the taxi makes local routes.
I sober up for a minute, “Don, your study guide!”
Mageza smiles, ominously, “Don’t worry, Cathy. We’ll go to Don’s house. First, we have to hustle up more money, for beers and petrol. The local routes are the quickest way to accomplish that.”
“OK,” I say.
After taking my first sip on my third beer, I start to feel the effects of the alcohol.
Don brushes up against me, “Hey, Cathy. Are you still with us?”
I half smile, “Yes, handsome.”
The words were out of my mouth before I can think.
Don comes closer to me. He smells like Axe body spray. Granted there are no other passengers in the taxi. It’s just the three of us.
Our lips touch, softly.
We kiss.
The kiss is short and tastes like cigarettes and beer. But I like it.
Soon after an old lady and two young girls board the taxi.
“Sanibonani ba zukulu,” she says.
We all reply, “Yebo, gogo.”
The taxi starts moving again. I ask Don for another beer. By this time, I am lit.
He reaches into the cooler box and produces two beers. His and mine.
When I take a sip of my ice-cold Savanna, the old lady gives me, the stank-eye.
I don’t know, how or why. But I feel the need to tell her off, “Gogo, what’s wrong? You’ve never seen alcohol in your life? Ungaphaphi. Or I will tell my boyfriend to kick you off his taxi!”
Mageza intervenes, “Eish, gogo. Please forgive us. We are drunk.”
The old lady backs down, “It is not what you take in your mouth that is poisonous, but what comes out!”
We all find our peace.
Me and Don, keep drinking, in peace.
By the fifth beer, I can barely keep myself together.
Don caresses my shoulder, “Hey, Cathy. You good? Suddenly you got quiet.”
I fake smile, “I am great love. Just wanna rest my eyes for a minute.”
I catch a glimpse of a sinister smile on Mageza’s face, “You may get your rest. Before you get too drunk. Consent is everything!”

Tell Us: What do you think will happen next?”

I can’t say I am proud of what comes next. All I will say is, peer pressure is a son of a bitch.
We arrive at Don’s house; he shares it with his older brother, Stormie, who’s away on business.
Ekuthuleni is a little suburb in Mrova. There’s fancy houses, well-kept yards, and luxurious cars.
I am tipsy but I still have control over all my senses.
We make it to the inside of the house. We chill in the lounge. It’s a cool, cozy lounge; with a leather couch, a fireplace, a huge flat screen TV and a home theatre system.
Mageza, works the stereo, while I get friendly with Don.
“Cathy, are you still with us?”
I tilt my head back, “Yes, love. Or you want me to prove it?”
Teenage Dreams comes over the speakers.
“Please turn that up. It’s my favourite song!”
Mageza joins us on the couch, “Oh yeah? How about a strip tease as you dance to your favourite song.”
I gasp, “A strip tease? No way. I don’t know how to do that.”
Don intervenes, “Forget that. How about you twerk for us instead. I know that you can do, because all the girls from school can.”
I smile ominously, “Oh yeah?”
“Hell yeah!”
I get up from the couch and slowly dance next to the speakers.
“Twerk! Twerk!” Mageza shouts.
I shake my size 26 waist and what little ass I have.
They both go wild and get up from the couch to join in. they sandwich me in between. We dance while they play with my braids and touch my ass.
I get tired and light a cigarette.
After two beers and three cigarettes, I feel hot. I turn to Don, “Don, I think I am sick. I feel hot.”
Don examines me, “Nah you’re fine. You’re just wearing too much clothing. Mageza told you about the strip tease. It was for your benefit.”
I am surprised, “Serious? OK. I will do it!” I exclaim.
I get up from the couch, “Play a provocative song.”
Mageza plays a smooth, slow jam, instrumental, “Can you work with this?”
I nod.
I sway my hips rhythmically to the beat. I let my hands run all over my body.
Their unblinking eyes and gasping mouths are all the confirmation I require to know I am doing a marvelous job.
I struggle a bit with my sweater; I can’t pull it off on time.
When I run my hands through my hair, Don loses his mind.
He gets up and rushes me with a deep kiss on the lips. I kiss him back passionately .
“I love you,” I say
“I love you too,” he replies.
He takes me by hand and leads me to his bedroom.
I say under my breath, “Will I really go through with it? I don’t know. I am too deeply invested in the moment to say no.

Tell Us: Do you think Cathy and Don are in love?

“Don, the past couple of weeks have been amazing. I never thought a guy who has it all like you, would even think twice about a plain Jane, like me.”
Don ruffles up my fro, “You’re my ride or die. Nothing will ever come between us.”
I believe Don is sincere.
We live like king and queen of Ikhethelo. Sneaking out of school to hang out with Mageza in his taxi. Then heading to Don’s house for a little “Playtime”
The next two months are nothing but bliss. Until I am three days on getting my period. I say to myself, “OMG! I can’t be pregnant. I know Don has it all, so he will provide for the baby. But how would I keep going, with a baby, at age 16? How will I explain this to my poor folks? They sent me to school to get a better education and uplift their standard of living.
For now, I decide to keep the news to myself, and perhaps Don.
I approach him at the football field, “Hey Don, can we talk?”
He pulls away from the students playing Ludo and signals me to walk with him to “our” usual spot at the end of the football field.
He grabs my hand, “Cathy, u grand? I miss you. How about we skip the afternoon classes, for a little ‘playtime’ at my house?”
I shake my head, “No.”
Don is surprised, “What? Did you just say ‘No’ to me? What’s gotten into you? You’ve never done that before.”
I caress his hand, “Sorry love, I am not myself.”
“Wanna smoke a joint?”
I gasp, “Hell no!”
Don tightens his grip, “What do you mean by that?”
I look down at my feet, “Eish, Don, I don’t even know where to start.”
“You’re not pregnant. Are you?” he asks sternly.
I look away.
Don is angry, “What? Pregnant?! You taxi skank! That’s not my baby. I knew you were a ho’ from day one. Now you wanna scam me? Voetsek!”
I sob, “No, Don, No!”
I can’t believe how Don is talking to me, “Don, please!” I cry out.
He let’s go off my hand, “I want nothing to do with you. Stay away from me. I already have a beautiful girlfriend. Why would I want anything to do with a zero like you, when I have a girl who keeps it one hundred?!”
“But Don, you claimed to love me!”
Don sneers, “Me, love you? You must be out of your mind. I am the coolest guy in school. Why would I love you, a plain Jane?” He shuffles me to the ground, “Now get the hell off my face, you’re cramping my style!”
I get up and run off with tears streaming down my cheeks.

Tell Us: What do you think of Don?

Scared of going to class with tears running down my face. I decide to cry in the parking lot. I sit there thinking about my next move. I come up short, tears flooding every time. Little do I know there’s a “Little Birdie” watching me from a safe distance; it’s Miss Mavimbela, the English teacher.
“Hey baby bird. Kubuhlungu kuphi?” she asks concerned.
I get up from the pavement, “Nowhere, I am fine.”
She hands me a tissue, “You don’t look fine to me. Quit messing around! What is it? Are you being bullied in class?”
“No, ma’am.”
She caresses my shoulder, “What then? Boy troubles?”
I nod.
“What about a boy? Are you pregnant?”
“I feel sick. I think I wanna throw up!”
Miss Mavimbela comforts me, “Crying won’t get you out of this one. The best I can do is take you to the nurses’ office”
I wipe my face, “Thanks ma’am.”
I sit at the nurses’ office, waiting for the results. I hold hands with Miss Mavimbela for support.
“Thanks ma’am. I don’t know how I would manage without you.”
She smiles and caresses my soft hand. I feel safe in her hands. So safe, that I confess to her, how I ended up in this situation. I sing like a canary, starting from day one; with Cindy and Babes, the two snakes who sold me for a pack of cigarettes and a bag of zol. I told on everyone; from the boys who play Ludo for money to Mageza, the nasty taxi driver, who offers liquor to underage girls.
I add, “And Don sells cigarettes and zol, at the football field. And he pushed me to the dirt.”
Miss Mavimbela is shocked, “OMG! Cathy, you went through all that? Don’t worry, it’s all over now. You won’t have to deal with those people anymore. They are all expelled, with immediate effect. You can take my word on it. And as for Mageza, his days are numbered.”
Nurse Sakhile comes back with the results, “Cathy Molawu! Please follow me.”
I turn to Miss Mavimbela, “Please go in with me.”
She half smiles, “OK. I don’t see why not.”
“Cathy, I have good, and bad news…”
Miss Mavimbela intervenes, “Good news first!” she commands.
Nurse Sakhile nods, “OK, you’re not pregnant.”
I half smile, “But what?”
“But you do have a bug in your system. Don’t worry we’ll take care of that.” he pauses.
“Sadly, you’ve contracted HPV. Eighty percent of the population has it. You will lead a normal, joyful life. Here are some pamphlets on HPV. I also suggest you research more on it, just to put your mind at ease. Plus, I will help you with the research, just swing by the office any time.”
I am relieved, “Thanks Nurse Sakhile. I will swing by!”
Miss Mavimbela gets up from her chair and I follow.
“Thank you, nurse. I will take this baby bird to the hospital for a second opinion. But for now, we have to chase away the pest!”
I may have HPV. but by my calculations, I dodged a bullet. I watch as the principal kicks the bad apples out of school.
“Hamba nja!” I shout at Don, as the principal escorts him and his band of misfits off school premises.

Scatterlings of Africa

                              

 Lawrence Winkler

                                                                   Botswana 1996

                                                         ‘We are going on a safari  
                                                          See the lions from my Ferrari  
                                                          Hope we do not get the malari  
                                                          It’s safari time...’  
                                                                           Dr Bombay, *Safari*

Robyn kissed me goodbye at the ferry terminal. The trip across the Georgia Strait was remarkable for two reasons: (1) Our boat’s apparent inability in coupling with the dock on the other side, and (2) A conversation with a Swiss transplant living in Victoria who went apoplectic when I mentioned the name of the current collectivist tyrant of the province.
“If the Swiss were running BC…” He wagged an index finger.
“If the Swiss were running BC…” I said, “The hospitals would have pay toilets.”
I was on the first leg of a journey to Johannesburg but that wasn’t my ultimate destination. I was meeting my New Zealand father-in-law, Ronnie, for a bucket list pilgrimage to Botswana. I had collected its stamps as a boy when it was still the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Thirty years after its independence, Robyn had booked us on the flagship camping expedition of Drifters Adventure Tours. Walk your Dreams… We were going on safari, six years before it became an Apple web browser, in an era when a trannie was still a transmission, LBT was lettuce, bacon and tomato, and before ‘woke’ would mutate from a verb to an adjective. After years of sedentary shriveling, my wanderlust screamed for a resurrection. Why am I soft in the middle?.. The rest of my life is so hard… I need a photo-opportunity… I want a shot at redemption…
I took the Maverick Bus to the Hotel Vancouver, and then an Aeroporter to every hotel in town until I had to ask the driver if he knew the way. I checked into my flight to Frankurt and headed towards my departure gate. Along the corridor I stumbled across a seafood shop where little Oriental people made vast amounts of money selling tiny bits of the local denizens of the deep to other little Oriental people with closed minds and open wallets. When one of the little Oriental people inquired if I needed help, I told him I wasn’t in need.
“Too expensive?” He chortled with the similar sales technique that had built the Bridge on the River Kwai.
“Nope,” I said. “Too small.”
Only cheap airfares take you over the North Pole to get to Africa. The Lufthansa flight was nine hours. The food was the usual stratospheric Styrofoam with a few sausages and apples and hazelnuts thrown into some simulated gemütlichkeit. I sat beside an ancient Vancouver stockbroker named Orville. I nudged him awake when he began drooling on my right shoulder. He awoke on point.
“You want an investment tip?” He asked. I told him I didn’t want an investment tip.
“When you get to Johannesburg, call your wife and tell her to buy a Bolivian stock called Tapajos Gold.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s going to explode like a rocket.” It didn’t sound like a safe investment.
“What stock exchange?” I asked.
“Vancouver.” It sounded even less like a safe investment.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Eighty-three,” he said.
“If you’re such a hotshot broker, why are you still working?” The rest of the flight was quiet. In Frankfurt, bagged like the game I planned on shooting, I fell in love with a new Leica camera in a duty-free shop, and we ran off to Africa together.
The animated clicking sounds of smiling Xhosa teenagers greeted my arrival at the crowded South African Airways embarkation gate. After six long hours as a departure lounge lizard, the SAA boarding announcement was worth the wait. Unlike the class divisions still plaguing our rainbow nation final stop, there was no prolonged stratified trickle of elite gold and platinum and cattle class passengers by row number.
“OK, everybody.” Rolled the ticket agent. “Huis toe gaan tyd. Time to go home.” And with that, five hundred multicolored Africans stood up and single-filed onto the jumbo jet. Cry, the Beloved Country. I sat beside a plum farmer from Namibia. We toasted each other in halting German with a Bordeaux blend that tasted like black cherries.
All roads lead to Johannesburg. Alan Paton rang in my ears as they recompressed on landing. Nosecond Johannesburg isneededuponthe earth. One is enough.
A stocky middle-aged Afrikaner named Ivan was waiting for me outside security. As he drove us to the Drifters Inn in Northcliff, he filled me in on what had happened to South Africa since I had worked there 14 years earlier. We spoke of our hopes for Mandela.
“I fear for the country when the old man dies,” he said.
Ronnie greeted me with his trademark bonhomie from our balcony when we arrived at the Inn. If you’ll be my bodyguard…I can be your long lost pal…
I tried to sleep but couldn’t. Something was nagging in the back of my brain. I called Robyn.
“Buy Tapajos Gold.” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Bolivian gold mining stock on the Vancouver Stock Exchange.” I was calling from E’Goli. The City of Gold, with the deepest mines in the world, 4 kilometres deep.
“How much should I buy?” She asked.
“A lot.”
Ronnie and I caught up with each other next day in a jet lag fog over a pub lunch of burgers and Greek salad at Baron & Archer, a local watering hole that was to become our standard, and a steak dinner at a Portuguese restaurant that evening. Sleep remained elusive.
My old Cape Town memories flooded back in guava juice next morning over breakfast at a local mall. We had signed up for a guided tour of what was once known as the Southwestern Township. The South African government created Soweto in the 1930s to geographically separate the races. Blacks were moved from Johannesburg to townships divided from White suburbs by a cordon sanitaire, usually a river, a railway track, an industrial area or a highway.
The apartheid intention was to construct a dormitory shanty town on steroids for non-whites who required passes to work in the white houses and factories and industries of Johannesburg. It quickly became the largest Black city in South Africa. To maintain tight military control, access was limited to four easily secured highways penetrating the four cardinal points of the compass. The government restricted infrastructure and services and prevented residents from owning their homes or starting their own businesses. Roads remained unpaved, and inhabitants shared one water tap and communal bucket toilet among far too many squalid houses.
In 1971, Parliament passed the Black Affairs Administration Act and appointed the West Rand Board to take over the powers and obligations of Soweto. Manie Mulder, its politically appointed board chairman had no experience in native affairs. He gave a most famous quote to the Rand Daily Mail in May 1976. The broad masses of Soweto are perfectly content, perfectly happy. Black-White relationships at present are as healthy as can be. There is no danger whatever of a blow-up in Soweto.
But on 16 June 1976, mass protests erupted over the government’s policy to enforce education in Afrikaans rather than their native language. Police opened fire on 10,000 marching students. The number killed in the Soweto uprising was given as 176 but estimates of up to 700 have been made. Doctors recorded bullet wounds as abscesses. All the blood washed by rain… And all tears dried by age…
An angry mob broke into the building and stoned Dr Melville Edelstein, a lifelong humanitarian, to death. His Litvak parents had first travelled to Cape Town in 1896 before joining the masses of Boere-Jode farmer Jews. A reporter later found his body impaled with a note. Beware Afrikaans is the most dangerous drug for our future. The evening news brought out all the publicity. Just a little atrocity deep in the city.
With such a history, foreign tourists, weighed down with their fancy cameras, wandering the squatter camps and giving money to the street urchins, expected something edgy. Everything above the mud was made of tin and tatters. Even outside the old ‘matchbox’ houses, the smell was overpowering. Inside, the conditions were horrid. A man walks down the street… It’s a street in a strange world… Maybe it’s the third world…
In the year of our visit, Sowetans earned six and a half times less than their counterparts in the better areas of Joburg. In the ultimate shock tour, Ronnie went into shock. Maybe it’s his first time around… Doesn’t speak the language… He is a foreign man…
I found him donating his pack of cigarettes to a thin, old Zulu and asked him why.
“He told me he had tobacco losses.” Ronnie said. I looked at the man.
“He told you he had tuberculosis.”
“Oh.” He said and broke down weeping.
The random advertising billboards were poignantly ironic. Tastic Rice-o-mix flavoured rice… Take a break from all white cooking… tasty and perfect every time… Under an old beach umbrella, the young black mother who sold eggs from her roadside card table was flanked by a small cement water tower plastered with posters. Some were from the township. Soweto Beauty, Health, Fitness, and Hair Show 1994. Some were ridiculous. When eating brings discomfort, ENO brings relief. And some, like the large Striptease playbill plastered with a naked cross-legged image of Demi Moore were unspeakably offensive.
The tour took us into history. In one poor part of Africa, Vilakazi Street was the only path in the world to have the historical residences of two Nobel Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, on the same road. We visited the memorial to Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy killed by police in the 1976 uprising, whose iconic photo began the end of Apartheid. Ronnie and I drank Gogo’s Ginger beer, named after a legendary shebeen queen in Sophia Town during the prohibition era of the 1950’s, as we toured the Soweto Country Club and Home for the Aged.
But the most ironic attraction was the BMW junkyard. It never occurred to us that the luxury German vehicles would have become the mafia’s ‘bicycle of Soweto’ but, not unlike those of Cockney and Australian rhyming slang, they had several affectionate names for their favorite mode of transport. Beat My Wife… Break My Window… Bob Marley and the Wailers…
Back at Baron & Archer that evening, we ate prawn curry with a bottle of white wine.
“Fancy another?” Ronnie asked, as he poured out the last of it. The conundrum was less about extravagance than it was about the limits to survivability. Ronnie was a beer man, had been his whole life. He well knew the effects of one more beer, but he had no concept of what an additional bottle of wine could contribute to an expanding universe of remorse.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Ronnie.” I said.
“You’re on holiday.’ He said, ordering up a new bottle. It turned out that I was on holiday, mostly from my usual good judgement.
And so we hurt the next morning. On our last day in Joberg, Ronnie and I walked to Rosebank Mall where we met Ernesto, an Argentinian businessman who offered to drive us to Goodfellows where I bought some wine for the final trip home. It was strange but we were more aware of personal danger in the wealthy white part of the City of Gold than we had been a day earlier in the supercity slum. Every home in Johannesberg seemed to come with razor wire, automatic gates, dogs, and instantaneous weaponized reaction to any criminal threat. Warning… 24 Hour Protection… Armed response to radio signal alarm… 787-1115.
Five years before our visit, the Group Areas Act was scrapped, allowing thousands of poor blacks to move into Jozie from the townships and other war-torn African nations. All hell broke loose. We came upon a wealthy white woman at the wheel of her Mercedes told an elderly black man to ‘pass quickly’ so she could open the gate to her estate driveway. Ag, Shem.
Even Charlie the Alsatian and McIvor the Scottish German terrier, the armed response system of the Drifters Inn, had learned the difference between black and white. It didn’t matter that they barked most of the night. For early the following morning, Ronnie and I were going on safari.
Fifteen years before African explorer Richard Burton appropriated the Swahili/Arabic word for ‘travel’ at the end of the 1850’s, another English engineer named William Cornwallis Harris led an expedition to observe and record wildlife and landscapes which formalized the safari style of journey—it started with a not too strenuous rising at first light, an energetic day walking, an afternoon rest then concluding with a formal dinner and telling stories in the evening over drinks and tobacco. Whatever ritual structure Harris had imposed on these expeditions, in whatever Kenyan colonial styles of pocketed and epauleted and belted crisp drill cotton khaki bush jackets and leisure suits, pith helmets and slouch hats, animal skin patterns and Holland & Holland or Westley Richards rifles would become safari de rigueur, had little to do with how raw Ronnie and I would be seeing the wilds of Southern Africa.

Safari fashion also extends to fragrance collections by American designer Ralph Lauren; The Safari fragrance created in 1990 was advertised as “a floral aroma with a light breeze scented by grasses, freedom, and the romance of vast open spaces.”

Morning broke on the City of Gold like the dawn of time. Just below our insomnia, the sliding gate groaned to get out of the way of the 2-ton juggernaut roaring through the gap it had left in the wall. Whatever parked under the courtyard Canary palms was big and noisy and as rough as the country that had spawned it. Out of the driver’s seat of an old Samel-20 troop carrier, riding high on mammoth wheels to protect it from land mines, welded together in right angles and painted white to hide its provenance, jumped a fit young khaki-clad South African. A Tyrolean hat sat on his blonde brush cut; Serengeti sunglasses hid his white eyebrows.
Garth would be our guide and guardian and chauffeur and chef and, for the hero he was, would have us in his debt forever. We climbed over introductions and up into the open viewing box, and Garth ground up and down through the gears, picking up and checking off the list of fellow adventurers who joined us on the way north out of Jo’berg. By the city’s outskirts we had a full truck: Andy, a Kiwi doctor and his girlfriend, Koo, Tony, a transplanted Brit printer immigrant to New Zealand, and his girlfriend Willie, Paul and Steve and Pres (three young guys from Holland), a quiet, pony-tailed Swiss guy named Lukas, and two German girls, Anna and Wiebke.
Our first day on the road was committed to just get up the road—a 1200-kilometre slog from the high veldt to the salt pans of eastern Botswana. Four hours into our own Voortrek (including a ninety-minute detour around Pretoria), we made a pit stop for petrol and Wimpy burgers in Potgeitesrsus, seven years before they changed the name to Mokapane. It was here I realized that Ronnie and I were heading into the remote acacia bushveldt without the benefit of alcohol, the cause of, and answer to, all of life’s problems.
A nearby bottle shop provided the opportunity to acquire a perfect libation that might last the entire safari. Unfortunately, I didn’t pick one of these. Not for me the robustness of high proof liquor. Instead, I grabbed a box of bottled poetry, sunlight held together by water—a 5-litre cask of Namaqua Cellar Cask Johannisberger Red—With a gentle breeze from the nearby ocean to cool them down, a selection of cultivars perfect for creating affordable quality produce an everyday drinking red wine with a distinctive bouquet, a healthy ruby colour with a smoky strawberry nose, sweet with a firm touch of Merlot, Pinotage and Ruby Cabinet, and a long fruity aftertaste, best served chilled. Alas, there was no gentle breeze from the nearby ocean and the only thing served chilled about my purchase was its promise which, after several days in the African sun, would be left unchilled and unfulfilled, having turned into bad sherry and the butt of our merry band.
Refueled and reprovisioned, Garth navigated our Landmaster out through a gauntlet of
roadside vendors selling potatoes, onions, and aluminum cookware into a seven-hour purgatory of heat and linear motion that brought us into Botswana and Nata Sanctuary well after dark. His flashlight danced around our campsite to show us how to put up our old army surplus tents for the first time. Huddled together around a campfire, we ate spaghetti Bolognaise while Garth warned us about straying from the herd. He recounted the story of one East German tourist who ‘went for a walk’ one daybreak and was killed by the Cape Buffalo in the last photo on his camera. Ronnie and I slept in the middle of our canvas tent.
I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy. After a breakfast of rusks, muesli, fruit and coffee, the three Dutch guys, and Lukas and Ronnie and I wandered across the pan in search of game but only found tracks and spoor. At midday, we folded our tents and reboarded the Unimog for a hot, windy trip down the Maun Road.
Ronnie stood on the engine box behind the cab, scanning the horizon. He pointed with an index finger what his keen eye had seen running through the scrub.
“There you are,” he said. “Your first lion.”
“That’s a warthog, Ronnie.” I said. But it was too late. From that moment, the merry band pointed out every warthog we passed as a lion. The next time Robyn and I flew to New Zealand, I brought a stuffed toy warthog as a present.
“Lion.” I smiled, handing it over.
The peripheral patchy shrubby savannah and marshes at the fringes of the salt desert held great oases of Baobabs, each tree more than 4000 years old. Wildlife was supposed to be scarce during the dry season, but there was enough. Lone zebras wandered termite mounds. We drove past marabou storks and the remains of a dead kudu with its hindquarters eaten and long gone.
Garth steered our great white hope through the Kalahari Basin along the edges of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, a lunar landscape of superlatives. The evaporated lake that spawned its formation tens of thousands of years ago is the size of Switzerland. In 2019, mitochondrial DNA research identified it as the 200,000- year-old birthplace of all modern humans. Echoes of the very first cry… Who made me here and why beneath the copper sun?
Driven by local climate change after 70,000 years of settlement, our ancestors migrated northeast and southwest through fertile green corridors. After the rain disappeared, a thin layer of blue-green algae was the only plant life that could exist in a boundless desert of salt. The missionaries couldn’t get across it. We were just a few Scatterlings hurtling along its rim. But now, they have lithium.
Four hours into our journey, we turned south off the Maun Road. in the last rays of the late afternoon, Garth eased the Unimog into a palm island at Jack’s Camp on the sharp edge of the Makgadikgadi Pan.
We spread our tents beneath a grove of mokolwane trees. The wildlife was more abundant. A vervet monkey sprang out a metal trash bin. There were signs of more. Please do close the door after using the toilet in order to rid baboons getting inside and messing everything up.
Garth made a stew of Herculean proportions and we all sat in a circle and chatted the evening away. Later, in the middle of the night, full on illuminated under an African halfmoon and bottom lit clouds, I walked out into the salt pan accompanied only by our trenching spade, Douglas, and dug a hole in the dry, salty, clay crust. The only sound in the universe was its crunch underfoot, like the other salt deserts I had known in Bolivia and India and China. And we are homeless, homeless… Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake…
Back on the Maun Road next morning, Garth joggled his Unimog stick shift up and down through 5 synchromesh gears, the virtual villages of Xhane and Joani and Chanoga, and 250 kilometres to Crocodile Camp on the banks of the Boteti River. After pitching our tents, he drove us back into Maun to change money and reprovision for the next day’s trip into the Okavango Delta. Back in the day, it was a town of wild donkeys and red lechwe and tribal rondavels and cattle and goats, all wrapped in dry heat and soft indolence, although there were signs in Setswana of harder things to come: Go thibela AIDS go motlhofo… Go nna fela o sa tlhakaneke dikoso… Go nna le motho a le mongwe… Go dirisa sekausu. Preventing AIDS is easy… Do not mix the courses… Be with one person… Use a sock.
Back at the campsite, after a swim at the pool, I dozed under an acacia tree. Just on dusk, we all congregated around one campfire while Garth stoked another for a braii of steak and boerewors and sosaties.
“Dit is die lewe, neh, Boet?” Channeling my poor Afrikaans between bites of overdone meat and sips of Johannisberger Red. This is the life.
“Braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies, and Chevrolet.” He agreed. And told us more Okavango horror stories as southern stars filled the sky.
Maybe it was because of my afternoon nap that I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was because of Garth’s cautionary tales. Maybe it was the barking dogs that gave way to the crowing roosters. I looked over at my father-in-law, sleeping soundly in his swag. In his life of the time, he was having the time of his life. He is surrounded by the sound… Cattle in the marketplace… Scatterlings and orphanages… He sees angels… Spinning in infinity… He says, ‘Amen and Hallelujah.’
I awoke to a hornbill pecking at an orange impaled on our papyrus reed fence. After a big baked bean breakfast, we packed up slowly until midmorning when Garth returned from town with fresh provisions.
“All aboard.” He ordered. And the Unimog lurched out of Crocodile Camp into a torrid dry season swelter, along the fence that divided agriculture from adventure.
The great Okavango River, rather than streaming to the sea, flows southeast inland from central Angola into the vast Kalahari, and disappears. In its annual ebb and flow, we were rolling into its ephemeral ebb, to where it no longer was. Before the evaporation, its currents had molded and sculpted the land beneath, then lifting like a theatre curtain to reveal a landscape without landmarks. Lost in a dry delta abyss, our tire tracks would map it no more than those of the year before, now buried under shifting sands.
But there is still water in the delta in the dry season. We arrived at a narrow alluvial fan finger channel dotted with day lilies and lined with papyrus reeds, swaying in the current and reflected golden on the water in the morning light.
A dozen Wayeyi men waited under the mokolwane palms, sitting on their haunches beside their diagonally parked mokoros, 20-foot-long sausage tree dugout canoes that, from a distance, looked like brown pea pods in the sun. With smiling faces of less colour and more khmer, it could have been Cambodia. Garth jumped down from the Unimog cab and greeted them with three-ways handshakes.
“Dumelang!” Rang through the encampment. Hello!
Pairs of boatmen welcomed pairs of our merry band into their hollowed-out hardwood conveyances. I sat behind Ronnie, the sacred cask of Johannisberg Red cradled between my knees. One of the native men sat in the bow; the other stood in the stern behind us, pushing us forward into the shallow waterway with his long ngashe pole. It could have been a Venetian gondola or an Oxford punt if the polers had worn different hats. Everyone was in a festive mood but more than crocodiles lurked in the lily pads.
Garth had warned us that, because mokoros were used by poachers, they were vulnerable to attack by hippos, which had figured out the game. My breakfast borborygmi flapped like hostile hippopotami on the hardwood bottom of the boat. Braaaahhhhck!
“Hippo!” I shouted, and everyone broke into fits of slapstick laughter. And then I did it again with the same fart fiesta feedback.
“Sis Wink!” Garth called back. “Did you just baff?”
Ronnie looked around in puzzlement.
“Where’s the jungle?”
“What?”
“Where’s the jungle?” He repeated. “Isn’t this supposed to be Africa?” It was then I realized that my father-in-law, first time out of New Zealand and raised on Johnny Weismuller films, had been expecting a more tropical equatorial experience.
“We’re a long way from the Congo basin, Ronnie,” I said. “It’s a big continent, and Tarzan doesn’t live in the Okavango swamp.”
“Oh.” Dropped the penny.
It may not have been rain forest, but the place was still very much alive. Diving Bee Eaters preyed on unsuspecting insects. Snakebirds torpedoed through the water spearing fish. The elongated Nosferatu feet of colourful Jacanas treaded delicately on the floating vegetation, and African fish eagles cried overhead. With every push of his ngashe, our poler propelled us onward through the narrow reed-lined channel past a mosaic of marshy islands established in ancient termite mounds where trees had taken root. After twenty minutes, we glided into a swimming hole and plunged headlong into the water. Half-submerged in the coolness, we played frisbee and ate a fruit salad lunch, until Garth motioned for us to reboard our dugouts. The day floated further fluvial past elephants and baboons into the late afternoon. As the sun’s rays lengthened the heat dissipated, the delta dust danced in the breeze, and the mokoros transformed back into brown pea pods in the twilight.
As we wrestled our canvas tents into shape, Garth pulled apart several chickens into an excellent stew. A waxing gibbous moon rose over this uncharted world. Flickering among the reeds, fireflies confused the stars. Frogs chanted endless mantras in the darkness. The map was broken but we were whole.
The eastern streaks of first light kindled fire in the sky; soft breezes whispered through the reeds. Our mokoros slid from the mud bank into the African dawn. We moved silent past our first glimpse of hippos, or at least that’s what our Wayeyi boatmen thought.
Braaaahhhhck! The dugout bottom beneath my bottom rattled and reverberated with flatulent furore, exciting panic and then howls of laughter through our aquatic amphitheatre.
“Wink!” Garth shouted.
“Every time he farts it pushes us forward.” Ronnie said.
Most members of our merry band were good-natured and congenial. Except for Tony, who had earned the nickname ‘Gabby’ because of his incessant imperious blathering about everything for which he considered himself an expert. Which was everything he considered. My gassiness was benign by comparison. He was also a racist and a chauvinist, traits which would become increasingly apparent as our safari continued.
After another midday swim and a feast of tuna and gherkins and tomato and cheese and asparagus, our Wayeyi gondoliers poled their mokoros deeper into the Okavango channels. We arrived at James’s Camp on dusk. Ronnie and I had become proficient in erecting and tearing down our canvas condo. After an evening game walk, Garth served another braai around our campfire. The African sun had added new flavours to our cask of Johannisberger Red—a horrid box of acidic plonk had acquired off-key notes of chamomile and almonds and yak butter and molasses. But without it, we would need to survive on nothing but food and water. A flaming tangerine sunset bled into the channel reflections and onto the reeds.
During the night there came thunder and lightning and then a soft and quiet female rain, just enough to keep us awake and wondering. In a country home to much of the Kalahari Desert, the word for rain in Setswana, Pula, is the same as its national state currency, the symbolism of its blue-grey flag, and its national motto. Let there be rain.
Garth served up bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast next morning and then took our merry band on a five-four game walk in the delta. Our path crossed those of elephants, rooibok, giraffe, springbok, baboon, wildebeest, and a vulture atop a red lechwe carcass just abandoned by wild dogs. The termite mounds were massive, built vertically so their inhabitants could avoid drowning in the shallow water table. Back at the campsite, we spent our afternoon sitting around the fire. Just before sunset one of the boatmen took me on a private tour to experience hippo squeals and grunts close but not too close. My sound effects had been a poor rendition of the real thing.
Garth put together an excellent crocodile stew. It gave me dreams of home. And we are the scatterlings of Africa… on a journey to the stars… Far below, we leave forever… dreams of what we were.
It was a long boat ride back to the Unimog next morning. I had to pole back a few hundred metres to retrieve the Tevas I forget at our last swimming hole. We left the boatmen, now reunited with their wives and children, in a trail of dust. The ride back to Maun was a long hot grind. Under my safari hat, standing behind the cab for airflow, I tied a red keffiyeh loose around my nose and mouth. The journey broke only for a bottle shop stop for a gigantic tin of Coke. Thatch and grass rondavels gave way to mud houses closer to town. Back at Crocodile Camp, the afternoon floated away at the pool, reading, napping, and talking to another safari guide, a lost soul named Ernie. His wife left him and took the kids to Jo’berg. He still hoped for their return.
We spoke of Africa then and now. Ernie told me of his trials with tribes and tourists. On one excursion, he was so desperate to get the French and Dutch halves of his group together, he put marijuana in the stew. It had no diplomatic effect on the warring factions but, at the end of the safari, he received a glowing report from both sides.
“Thank goodness I have the job I do.” He said. “Otherwise, I’d have nothing.” He wasn’t far off otherwise. For all the risks they took driving and cooking and guarding and nature interpreting and problem solving, Drifter’s guides made less than $500 a month. The night dogs howled restless until the Tswana roosters broke the dawn.
A megaphone message from a local politician running for re-election moved through the camp during breakfast. If voting could change anything, they would have made it illegal. Midmorning found us clambering back abord the Unimog for a six-hour slog through the Mababwe depression. Here the worst clays in Botswana made for the deepest during the wet season. The natives were notorious for deliberately directing strangers to flooded Khwai River routes that would mire them stuck above their axles. A wildebeest skull atop a sign announced we had made it through. Savuti 54… Kasane 226…
Moremi Game Reserve was named in 1963 for Chief Moremi III of the resident Ngamiland BaTawana tribe. It was designated a reserve rather than a park because they allowed the BaSarwa Bushmen to stay. The midday heat that raised blisters in the atmosphere and the malarial mosquitos should have been a dealbreaker. Garth navigated through Moremi North Gate and six hours of us dodging mopane and acacia tree branches. Just beyond Xakanaxa, we arrived at our MK1 campsite to a drumbeat of snorting water hippo, breathing the same air. Stir fry stuck to merry ribs under the stars. Sleep came fast to tired children under the moon.
We broke camp and cracked a hundred kilometres of savannah by sunrise next morning. The wildlife on the way to Third Bridge camp—giraffe and zebra and jackal and impala and wildebeest and a leopard and several of Ronnie’s lions—had wilted in the blast furnace trying to bleach the marrow from their bones. It was insanely hot. After a lunch of pilchard and corned beef sandwiches I dragged my bruised and battered numbness under the Unimog for a siesta. A hundred elephant legs raised dust devils through the campsite in the late afternoon. After the herd passed, I crawled from my sandy slumber to everyone’s relief.
Another early start steered our Landmaster on a northeastern track into one of the hottest days of the safari. Through an endless landscape of parched scrub and elephant herds in their desperate search for water, after too many hours of troop carrier clattering, Garth pulled us into the Savuti #1 campsite. We pitched our canvas under the shade of some big acacia trees, next to a fire pit. The site was unfenced which allowed three warthogs access free rein to stand guard around the kitchen trailer. Garth pointed to a series of open wooden structures a few metres toward the dry channel bed.
“Ablution blocks,” he said. “Flush toilets and running water.” I didn’t need telling twice.
I ran downhill as fast as my legs could carry me through an open dunny door. Finally, I thought, a place where I could sit and relieve myself like a civilized man. I hadn’t counted on finding a gigantic Power’s toad in the toilet bowl. The creature comforts were already spoken for; my evacuation would take a different turn. I returned to the merry band to find Ronnie up an acacia tree with a tin can and a wire.
“I’ll be down in a minute, mate,” he said. “Just calling home.”
In the evening Garth drove us on another game drive. Another leopard screamed across our dusty path. “We’re eating vegetarian tonight.” He said, tossing several chickens on the braai. Anna pulled one of them off to show him.
“Those aren’t vegetables.”
“They are in my country.” He grabbed the bird back onto the coals. “Jy krap nie aan ‘n ander man se vuur nie.” You don’t mess around with another man’s fire. We zipped up our tents early.
On the road along the deep dirt of the Magwekwe Sandridge next morning, we came upon a fresh lion kill of a baby elephant. It was another long hot bone-banging slog to a remote torrid hill a long distance away from the Chobe River. Campsite #8 wasn’t Garth’s first choice of tenting ground and it would slowly become his worst nightmare. The sand was covered in Devil Thorn creeper which played scratch and win with our exposed Teva-clad feet. Our Samil-20 troop carrier starter motor died on the hill and we had to push the Unimog through the dunes downhill to pop the clutch and get it running. Ronnie and I pitched our tent in the most torrid expedition encampment thus far. My enthusiasm for cooking dinner caught him in the throat. I didn’t think the chili I prepared was that spicy, but my Kiwi father-in-law had known no picante flavours in his entire lifetime and declared my attempt to broaden this horizon as a gesture of premeditated homicide. We sat around the campfire long into the night. Copper sun sinking low… Scatterlings and fugitives… Hooded eyes and weary brows… Seek refuge in the night…
Peering through my camera at the flames, I detected furtive movements on the far side of the fire. It was a dark ghoul with black spots and yellow glowing eyes. I could smell some poor creature’s last gasp on its breath.
“There’s a hyena.” Ronnie sat up in the folding chair beside me. We would often find the four-toed tracks in the surrounding sand in the morning.
“I know,” I said. “I can see it through my telephoto.” The hyena whooped and giggled and groaned hysterical at my inertia. It seemed far too loud from where it was in my viewfinder.
“You don’t have your telephoto.” I lowered my camera.
“Oh.” Was all I had.
He was two feet away when we ran for our tent flap. Get these mutts away from me… You know, I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore…
It was well into our fourth day without a wash when the great white hope would no longer respond to a push start. The next two days were marooned on this hill of heat and thorns. It would have been a crucifixion if the trees had been more cypress than acacia. There weren’t supposed to be tsetse flies but they hadn’t received the memo.
Unlike those in the heads of our hyenas, the light had gone from Garth’s eyes. We were stuck. In the evening, he cooked another braai, and we retreated into our canvas cavities, serenaded by the sounds of a zebra stampede, a lion kill and roars of nearby unidentifiable encounters. What if I die here?… Who’ll be my role model… Now that my role model is gone…
The Botswana army truck that came to our rescue next morning broke its chain on the first attempt and snuck away in shame. We lolled around in the truck under a tarp through the heat of the midday sun until Pres managed to flag down another large lorry with a cable. The Samil started this time only for Garth to discover it had been left in 4-wheel drive. We left the hill, from devil thorn into dust devils. Strong wind, strong wind… Many dead, tonight it could be you…
Herds of elephants in their hundreds roared along the Chobe River. Watching them drinking made me want to kneel and drink with them. We passed kudu and giraffe and water buffalo and zebra. Garth made a pit stop at the Mabele General Dealer so we could pick up some of the Lion lager and Carling Black Label painted on one side of the shack.
At the north-eastern boundary of Chobe National Park, we entered the town of Kasane in triumph. Here at the ‘four corners’ intersection of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia’s Caprivi Strip, twenty years earlier, Elizabeth Taylor had remarried Richard Burton before divorcing him again ten months later. We were more jubilant.
“What are we doing here?” Wiebke asked.
“Booze cruise.” Garth shouted, pulling the Landmaster up to a long boat on a short wharf. “Jump aboard.”
We all jumped but it wasn’t aboard. Twelve merry scatterlings launched themselves into the Chobe River like they’d been shot from a canon.
“What about the crocodiles?” Garth asked.
“They’ll just have to take their chances.” Ronnie flew by his head. Back onboard, we all met Wilson, an excellent guide wearing iridescent green socks. He narrated our excursion past hippos, water buffalo, elephants, Egyptian geese, and Garth’s yellow-bellied Nile crocodiles. Ronnie and I sat at the back of the boat sipping a couple of beer, amused at the three Dutch members of our merry band inhaling all the others we left in the cooler. Wiebke had her chair collapse under her.
After the cruise, we piled back onto the Unimog to cross into Zimbabwe and our Victoria Falls campsite and the first shower in five days. Garth produced a double bushveldt version of macaroni and cheese for us and another Drifter’s safari group that had joined us. They were new and green and spoiled by their faux Capetown to Victoria Falls adventure and cut out for a local restaurant halfway through the meal, leaving Ronnie and I to wash dishes for both groups.
Morning found three more warthogs sniffing around our camp kitchen. After breakfast, Ronnie and I expropriated a bathtub to do laundry, and then hiked across a bridge to the next country over. You are now entering Zambia.
We made our way carefully along the flat basalt crest of the mile-wide cataract.
“Victoria Falls.” Ronnie stared into its splendor.
“Mosi-oa-Tunya,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“A Lozi name,” I added. “The Smoke That Thunders.”
“Didn’t Livingstone discover it?” He asked. “Scenes so lovely it must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.”
“It was here for 200 million years before he arrived.” I remembered the motto inscribed on his statue on the other side when I first came through fifteen years earlier. Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.
Even in the spray mist from the cascade, it was blazing hot, and I was delighted to arrive at the Devil’s Pool, precariously perched on the edge of the gigantic white water waterfall plummeting into the vast chasm.
I peeled off down to my underwear.
“Wouldn’t swim here if I were you.” Ronnie advised.
“Why not?”
“Don’t see any children playing in this water, do you?”
“Nope.” I plunged into the coolness, submerged and remerged, revived. The current tried to pull me over the edge of the precipice into the gorge below. Out of the corner of one eye, I watched a young black schoolkid in a uniform, weighed down with a satchel full of books, running at full tilt towards us. He stopped beside Ronnie, trying to catch his breath.
“What?” I floated in the freshness.
“I… would… not swim… there.” He stammered.
“Why not?” I asked. He pointed to a place behind me.
“Because that crocodile took my friend three weeks ago.” I turned to find two golden green reptilian eyeballs a foot apart and less than twenty feet away. I didn’t need to be told twice.
It was a long hot walk back along the rift.
“I told you I wouldn’t swim there.” Ronnie couldn’t resist.
Our merry band went out to dine that evening at a carnivorous eatery called the Cattleman’s steakhouse.
“You having the crocodile, mate?” Garth asked.
“Sometimes you eat the crocodile,” I said. We sat around the campfire later, trying to figure out the constellations.
Most of the scatterlings went white water rafting next morning, but Ronnie and Wiebke and I hiked the Zimbabwean side of the cataract and had lunch on the terrace of the Victoria Falls Hotel overlooking Second Gorge and the Victoria Falls Bridge. Beyond the ice cream vendors in red uniforms on their cycle carts, Ronnie and I took a midafternoon helicopter flight. Hovering over the predigital panorama, I couldn’t load the roll of film onto my new Leica camera, and we fell out of love.
But it was a full moon night of candlelit silver service at the Boma restaurant dinner and drum show that evening. Tony surprised us with a rare display of generosity by shouting a round of beer.
“That box of wine must be sherry by now.” He said.
“It’s a raisin in the sun.” I said, chowing down on a wild game feast of ostrich crepes, kudu, and warthog. There was chocolate cake for dessert in honour of Paul’s birthday. Barking dogs and disco serenaded us through the night.
A welcoming sign received us outside the exposition grounds of the Falls Craft Village next morning. TRADITIONAL DANCING A spectacular display of circumcision rituals… mysterious Nyau dancing… spirit costumes… a legend revealed… vibrant war dancing…Book now… Enquiries: Falls Craft Village… phone 4309…
“I want to get my mother a hippo carving but I only have this much change left.” Ronnie opened his palm. There was a Zim dollars’ worth of coins. “And I’ve already asked all the vendors.”
“Ebony or serpentine?” I asked.
“You’ll be lucky to get paper.” He said. I took the coins and re-entered the village. I found all the carvers eating lunch behind a reed fence.
“What do you want?” Asked the one with the least food in his mouth.
“Who’ll sell me a stone hippo for this much money?” I asked. They all rose as one nation. Back outside I handed the sculpture to Ronnie.
“How’s you do that?” He asked. I told him of my Ashkenazi merchant lineage.
And then Garth pointed our troop carrier back south towards Nata Sanctuary. We almost didn’t make it. The beast sprung a fuel line leak (probably form the same overheated engine that had lit Ronnie’s knapsack on fire at least twice). Garth had worked through his last ball point pen sleeve to reconnect the lines before he volunteered me to hitch back into town for help. It was like old times. Half an hour later, I rediscovered myself in the back of a half-ton full of dead guinea fowl, cut straw, tyres and black guys whipping through the Africa night. Eventually flagged down another Drifter’s Unimog and turned him around. We passed Garth and the scatterlings making it into Jack’s Camp. Reunited, I threw a mat and my bags outside an A-frame and went for a shower. Refreshed, I found the boys at the bar and sat between Ron and a fellow named Nigel for dinner.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I own this place.”
“OK.” He and Ronnie started talking rugby.
“Our bokke beat you bad, Rooinek.” Nigel said.
“Only because you poisoned our food, Crunchie.” Ronnie countered. And the battle was rejoined. I excused myself for the company of the mosquitos in our A-frame. Parachuted German sleeping bags and flashlights dropped around me all night long.
In the morning, we all climbed aboard the bus back to Joburg, stopping only for breakfast at a Great Western hotel. The Afrikaner bus driver and his maasie were vintage South Africa. We arrived at Drifters Inn around 8 p.m. and retraced our path back to Baron & Archer for lamb shanks and wine that wasn’t sherry. One day in Johannesburg, and already the tribe was rebuilt, the house and soul restored.
Our last full day in the City of Gold began developing our memories at a photo shop in Cresta Shopping centre. Our final dinner ended at Carnivores, an African twist on the Argentinian churrascaria. Black waiters with aprons and straw hats sang in harmony. They brought great hunks of kudu, hippo, warthog, impala, eland, and wildebeest on Masai spears from a massive central circular barbeque inferno until we lowered our table flag in surrender.
Ronnie and I said farewell to Ivan in the morning, and to each other at the Johannesburg airport. I remember loudspeakers reverberating in German during my Frankfurt layover, and then nothing until I arrived home.
Pliny the Elder once noted that there is always something new out of Africa. But since my father-in-law safari not much of it has been good. Botswana has been devasted by drought and desertification. Twenty per cent of its population is infected with HIV/AIDS. The happy tribes of San Bushmen depicted in The Gods Must Be Crazy have been forcibly relocated on reservations far from their traditional hunting and gathering lands, which turned out to lie in the middle of the world’s richest diamond field.
The glass bottle that the film’s loincloth-clad hero threw off the cliff of God’s Window to save his tribe from divisive conflict has returned by thousands of others filled with firewater and fury. They live in tubercular squalor on handouts of cornmeal and contempt.
Beginning in April of 2019, poaching rings organized by Chinese traders have slaughtered 46 Moremi Reserve rhinos in less than 10 months, ten percent of all the rhinos in Botswana. The insatiable demand for rhino horn fetches up to $60,000/kg. ReconAfrica, a Canadian petroleum exploration company exploiting the oil deposits in ‘Kavango Basin’ sedimentary rocks insists its activities will have no ‘environmental impact’, like the illegal muddy mining cyanide annihilation of the Tapajos River in Bolivia. The value of the Tapajos Gold stock I bought on landing in Johannesburg soared high into the stratosphere before plummeting back into the ground the day I landed back in Vancouver. There is karma in the Kalahari.
And Ronnie? I think he had the time of his life on that safari. He admitted as much to his younger brother, but he never told me. Not long after I gave him his stuffed warthog, a hemorrhage blew a hole in his head where the untreated hypertension lived.
In the deep interior of the Okavango Delta, the annual rising flood waters sweep the canvas clean every year; this year’s landscape will only continue to exist in next year’s memory.
And we are the scatterlings of Africa… On a journey to the stars… Far below, we leave forever… Dreams of what we were…

The Wayward Ways of Lydia Hayworth

By
Fiyola Hoosen-Steele

Hello! Salaams! Come in, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you tea? How about samosas? I made them fresh and fried them crispy. You’re not like one of those baggy pants, fedora hat wearing hippies I see in Uncle Abdul’s spice shop looking for some chamomile-lavender-hibiscus concoction, are you? Do you take yours with a touch of milk like the English, or with a hint of cardamom and cinnamon like Indian-Indians, you know, chai?
They call me Sally. I’m the storyteller of the town. Name a family, point to a person, hint at an incident and I have details. I keep files on everyone. Not paper files! In my head, it’s a storage unit up there.
I never tell stories about my family. There’s no need with the scandals that go on in this town. Most days I sit on my stoep and watch dramas unfold, and other days tattletale birds in skirts whisper tidbits in my ear.
Of course my family is interesting! We have babies born out of wedlock, divorces, multiple marriages, elopements, extra-marital affairs, dabbling in drugs and alcohol, political incarcerations, fistfights at the soccer stadium, and deaths, all unexpected, hole-gapingly sad, and much too sudden. There are many of us, children, grandchildren, cousins, aunties and uncles. And we like laughing, the more politically incorrect a joke, the louder we laugh. And we love getting together, we don’t need an occasion to put cake on the table. And we are beautiful, especially the ladies, it’s in our bloodline, the desirable round hips and buttocks, we don’t have problems finding husbands. Also, we’ve more doctors in our family than most, and lawyers, optometrists, accountants, businessmen, teachers and nurses. We even have a diplomat who travels the world and mixes with the ‘who’s-who’ at the United Nations, but salt of the earth she is, never sticking her nose in the air, unlike Khadija from down the road who went to London for three months and came back with the Queen’s accent and a bun in the oven. In Afrikaans we say, ‘skrik vir niks’, no fear, not even of God.
Our story starts with my grandmother. Her name was Anna-Joanna. A surprising name to have in an Indian family in a small town in South Africa but oh, what a story!
Did you say Lydia Hayworth?
Lydia was not from the Indian side of the family, she was Anna-Joanna’s younger sister, from the Coloured side, although she was not classified Coloured, she was classified white.
Let me explain.
Coloured was the artificial name given by the apartheid state to people whose blood was mixed with a little or a lot of Bantu, Khoisan, European, Indian or Indonesian. And Lydia’s ancestry fell seamlessly into the Coloured designation. Her great-grandpa, Mr. Hayworth, heralded from Scotland and married a Khoi woman indigenous to the Cape. But Lydia did not look Coloured unlike Anna-Joanna who was a balanced blend, not too dark, not too light, not too coarse, not too soft. Lydia also did not look Khoi unlike her brothers Edward and Patrick whose full lips and curly hair were definitive Khoi features. She was more of a pale complexion, like milk, and her flaxen sun-streaked hair and jade-blue eyes held traces of the family’s Scottish blood.
Yes, race classification was based entirely on studying appearance, comparing skin tones to white paper, feeling the texture of hair, looking at the shape of jawlines and buttocks. That’s how it went in those dark days of apartheid when the Population Registration Act was enacted. And, no matter how much Lydia’s mother, Mary, explained to the apartheid goons that there were mixed marriages in the bloodline, they classified Lydia as white and the rest of the family as Coloured, and threatened that the police should not find her in the Coloured area and that she relocate to the whites only area.
Yes, it was commonplace for members of the same family to be classified into different race groups. Apartheid easily made mielie pap of one, biryani of some, and braai-vleis of another, children ripped from parents or parents forcibly removed, leaving the family ruptured. But Lydia, born under a lucky star, lived between her family home in the Coloured area of Aliwal-North, a dusty town on the banks of the Orange River in the Eastern Cape, and the home of a white farmer. It was the farm where her father Adam worked as klein-baas to the groot-baas, an assistant foreman. The farmer, Ou Piet, and his wife, Tannie Sannetjie, were like family and went along with the ruse.
It was not hard for Lydia to grow-up apart from her siblings. In fact, being classified white changed her, the change was subtle but noticeable, a touch of superiority in her step, a sneering down on the family. She didn’t mean to, but her whiteness highlighted their blackness. And Lydia wanted to be out in the world. She dropped out of school to work in Tannie Sannetjie’s kitchen where she baked the breads, cakes and pies that were sold at the farm store, and often went home with leftover baked goods that made up for the minimal wages she earned, a quarter of which she contributed to the family, and three-quarters of which she spend on luminescent lipstick, wide-brimmed hats and dancing shoes. After all, she was the local beauty and suitors traveled from far and wide to prance with her. And, Lydia moved through the world differently. She could study her naked body for hours in the full-length mirror that leaned up against her bedroom wall. One time, she even accepted to stand in her nakedness and be painted by a big-time artist from Johannesburg. It was as if she knew with certainty that her body was worthy of putting paint to brush to canvas. I am told a white couple bought the painting and hung it on their bedroom wall.
The marvel of Lydia’s life was that she gave apartheid its’ comeuppance.
Because she married five times, each husband a different race, one was even foreign, Portuguese, from the neighboring country, Mozambique.
Lydia’s first husband was Simon or Meneer Simons as everyone called him. He was the headmaster of the local school, thirteen years her senior. Everyone teased that he was her sugar-daddy, but Lydia said they fell in-love the old fashion way, by walking and talking. They walked home together from school. Nothing so scandalous! Lydia was not his student! She would go to the school to pick-up her nephews, Tony and John, Anna-Joanna’s boys who remained in Aliwal-North when Anna-Joanna went to work as housekeeper for a Jewish couple in Johannesburg. Lydia and Simon would talk for hours, often while watching Tony and John play, or hanging over the garden fence at her family home, and on all subjects, from books and politics to classical music, history, philosophy, sports, opera, even gardening. Simon had an air of sophistication, a refinement that Lydia found classy.
After they got married Lydia stopped wearing garish dresses, opting for beiges, baby-blues, lilacs, all high-cut with sleeves. She pinned her wild tresses and exchanged her dance shoes for church-going flats. She stopped eating meat, surprising given her link to Ou Piet’s farm where every part of a sheep was consumed; head, tongue, brain, trotters, and tripe, but she exchanged those delicacies for salads and steamed vegetables. And she smiled smaller and laughed softer. For Simon, Lydia needed no alteration, but in her head, the changes were what respectability looked, tasted and behaved like.
Then their twin girls were born, Dorothy and Janet, both of whom still live in Aliwal-North, spinsters, probably their way of rebelling against Lydia for abandoning them, though they were raised in her family home, amongst her belongings, by her mother Mary, and with the money she sent home. Their birth catalyzed Lydia’s unravelling. She said her breastmilk turned sour and refused latching. She threw open the doors and windows of the house claiming she couldn’t breathe while standing in the middle of the yard wearing a white-ribboned nightie smoking a cigarette. She binged on copious amounts of fatty sausage and chocolate. And many a morning the neighbors witnessed her walking to the train station, no shoes, empty suitcase, not boarding the train, only standing on the platform staring into the distance, until one morning when she donned a brilliant red dress, red kitten-heels, red lipstick, red flowers in her hair and boarded the train to Johannesburg. I’m told she returned years later, for Simon’s funeral, and wore the same red dress.
Lydia’s journey to Johannesburg took her into a job as a receptionist at the Fruit and Vegetable Exchange on Bree Street in the city center. There, her tight-fitting dresses and pretty eyes grabbed the attention of many white businessmen, one of whom was Erik Van Heerden, the wealthiest avocado farmer in Phalaborwa, a northernmost town of South Africa. Not much is known of the seven years that Lydia was Mrs. Van Heerden except that everyone called her Madam or Mevrou, and that she lived as a white woman in a big white house on a large estate, and took up driving, a silver Chevrolet, and drinking, scotch and whiskey. Her brother, Edward, once paid her a visit and relayed that she met him at the backdoor meant for Black servants and offered him dry brown bread and water in enamel utensils used by her Black gardener. She scolded him for showing up unannounced, warned him not to mention to anyone that he was her boetie, then drove him back to the train station, giving him the longest lingering hug and the fattest envelope stuffed with cash.
Lydia and Erik did not have children so there were no hearts to break on the day she left Phalaborwa, although I’m told she broke all the expensive plates, cups, glasses, vases and ornaments, smashed the furniture, used a hacksaw to cut through the mattresses and sofas, and set the curtains ablaze.
Erik must’ve done something terrible to incur her wrath. Whatever it was, his guilt was huge for Lydia received the biggest divorce settlement, so much money that she instantly became a woman of leisure. But instead of buying a comfortable home with a lovely garden in a tree-lined suburb as other white women of her standing would do, she banked the money and took her leisure in Anna-Joanna’s home in the Indian location, surrounded by Anna-Joanna’s sticky Indian children.
When Lydia and Anna-Joanna reunited, Anna-Joanna had left the city for this obscure town on its eastern outskirts and had converted from Christianity to Islam to marry Mohammed Ally, even changing her name to Halima, which in Arabic means forbearance, apt for all she tolerated in Mohammed’s family.
Yes, Mohammed was my grandfather and with him began our Indian bloodline, flowing back to his forefathers, long before they were taken from India by the British onto colonial ships and forced to work the sugarcane plantations in Natal as indentured laborers, and long after they morphed from laborers to land and buildings owners, establishing businesses and trading posts all over South Africa.
Mohammed had a best friend, Yusuf, who was heavily involved in South African politics. He was a revolutionary, an anti-apartheid activist, prominent in the Defiance Campaign and a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC founded by Nelson Mandela, and like Mandela, he was an enemy of the state who the South African Security Forces regularly jailed, detained and tortured. He lived a life fueled with risk and danger, slept with an AK-47 gun under his bed, and fell fervently in-love with Lydia, and she with him. Their love was that unexplainable, overpowering kind that was all limbs, fluids and feelings and more passionate and pleasurable than love described in Mills and Boons, the romance books that I hide in my kitchen, in the ladle and big spoon drawer, and that Aunty Fatima of the green grocer’s hides in her oven, behind the cake pans.
Yusuf and Lydia’s love led to pregnancy, Miriam and Yasmin, a second set of twin girls born to Lydia, which was biologically questionable as twins did not run in the family, not in the Coloured, Indian, Scottish or Khoisan bloodlines.
When Lydia informed Yusuf of the pregnancy, he proposed marriage and raced home to share the joyous news with his family. But they threatened to disown him if he made a life with someone of a different race, religion and culture, no matter how fair-skinned she was, which spoke volumes because Indians are partial to fair complexion, whether they reside in Bombay, Durban, Toronto or London, they adore fair skin, but can’t rise above their own special brand of racism, the caste system, the Indian way of thinking. In Afrikaans we call it, ‘kak gedagte’, shitty thinking or small mindedness.
Not deterred by family and defiant as ever, Yusuf wed Lydia and moved into a two-bedroom pondokkie in the Indian location, hidden from the jaws of apartheid. Sure, Lydia had the Van Heerden wealth, but she could not splurge because of the Mixed Marriages Act that made it an illegal punishable crime for different races to marry. In fact, Lydia and Yusuf’s union was especially punishable in comparison to the union of Anna-Joanna and Mohammed, a Coloured and an Indian.
Let me explain.
Lydia was classified white and a white woman marrying a man of inferior race was not only illegal it was damning, sinful in the eyes of the apartheid God for whom the sanctity of whiteness was preserved. It mattered only that white people did not marry across the color line. Us, Brown and Black people could mix and make merry so long as we did not taint the whiteness. You see, apartheid was less about the separation of the races and more about the preservation of whiteness.
Lydia’s year of marriage to Yusuf was the happiest of her life because with him she lived, in her words, the most romantic version of herself.
Yes, they were married for only a year.
Because he died.
Yusuf and his comrade, Sibusiso, were tasked by Umkhonto we Sizwe to blow-up the bus depot in Krugersdorp, a mining town on the West Rand of Johannesburg named after Paul Kruger, Oom Paul, who personified Afrikanerdom. But it went awry, either the plan was foiled by a impimpi, or the bomb was tempered with making it murder.
According to Lydia, the night before the operation Yusuf sensed something was askew. He told her that revolutions kill their sons for the good of the revolution. He said if the bomb he was carrying detonated while still in his possession then she should know he was killed by his own to further the goals of the revolution.
Yes, the bomb detonated in his carrier-bag before he planted it.
No, Lydia’s finger pointing was disregarded as ramblings of a grieving widow.
Yes, a bigger goal was revealed, but only to those not afraid to look.
You see, another comrade was also killed when the limpet mine he was to plant in Park Station, the main train station in Johannesburg, detonated in his possession. And in Durban, a comrade was killed when the bomb he was carrying exploded before he stepped into the lobby of the Holiday Inn, a popular beach-front hotel. And on Long Street in Cape Town a bomb exploded in a car outside a busy nightclub with the comrade still at the wheel. According to reports, the deaths were accidental, caused by a faulty ammunition consignment from Russia via Mozambique to the ANC. The Soviet link, rooi gevaar, drew international media attention and spotlighted the plight of oppressed South Africans, resulting in South Africa being declared a pariah nation, and in financial and military aid flowing into the ANC coffers from Libya, Cuba, Northern Ireland and China. The connection between the deaths and the surge of support for the revolution was clear, but there was no evidence, save a widow screaming murder.
After Yusuf’s death Lydia lived with his ghost, determined to prove he was killed. She neglected the twins, leaving them in Anna-Joanna’s care. Her only goal was to find Sibusiso, the comrade who accompanied Yusuf on the operation and who curiously disappeared. She began her search by confronting local ANC cadres, the Moodley’s, Naidoo’s, Akhalwaya’s and Cachalia’s. She even co-opted Mohammed, but he wanted no part of her mission, venerating Yusuf as a martyr. Finding no answers, she crossed the railway tracks that separated the Indian location from the Black township and went seeking there. Her frequenting the Black township led to her frequenting the homes of leading ANC families like the Tambo clan, where she encountered ANC higher-ups and discovered that Sibusiso had fled to Lusaka in neighboring Angola. She followed the trail using the Van Heerden name and wealth. I am told because of her beauty, wits and guile, and lots of palm greasing, she strolled into the ANC camp on the outskirts of Lusaka and found Sibusiso. Information about what happened after was scant, save for a letter she had sent to Anna-Joanna stating that she and Sibusiso were married. Her letter did not say it was love, but alluded to shared grief, survivor’s guilt, and remorse. The marriage did not last. She unwittingly blamed Sibusiso for Yusuf’s death and left Lusaka for Mozambique.
From what I gathered, every Umkhonto we Sizwe operation had a handler, and Yusuf and Sibusiso’s handler was from Mozambique. His name and location Sibusiso had disclosed to Lydia. She went searching, but the trail went dead.
She stayed in Mozambique for twelve years, first in Beira where she bought a lavish villa at the mouth of the Pungwe River and regularly entertained government officials and spies, looking for proof that Yusuf was killed. Then in Maputo, swapping her villa for a mansion overlooking the Indian ocean. The mansion belonged to Ricardo, her fifth husband, the Portuguese Ambassador to Mozambique, an influential man given that Mozambique was once a Portuguese colony.
I dare not speculate if it was a marriage of convenience, but there was no doubt Lydia harangued Ricardo’s good standing to prove that Yusuf was killed. And the title of Ambassador’s Spouse provided her with safety given that the ANC did not appreciate her question-asking.
When Ricardo’s tenure was up, Lydia refused to go to Lisbon with him claiming it was a far stray from her family. The truth was Lisbon was a stretch from her quest. She returned to Anna-Joanna’s home, and there she tarried until she gave-up Yusuf’s ghost and moved back to the Eastern Cape.
Yes, having found no evidence, she laid the ghost to rest.
But ending the quest was haunting. She spoke of it on her deathbed. I was there, so was Anna-Joanna, and Lydia’s daughters, all four of them, awkwardly patched-up in their reconciliation. In her dying moments, she called out to Yusuf, awakening the ghost and lamenting ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ on lips, cherry burgundy, eternally vibrant.
No, she did not die in Aliwal-North. Not even God with His wicked sense of humor could have willed her back there. Lydia lived out her days in Molteno, a farming town neighboring Aliwal-North. It was where Leon was from, where he worked as a traveling salesman for the farm that produced Ouma Rusks, the dried buttermilk biscuit that South Africans dunk into coffee and tea.
Leon was Lydia’s grace, the lover she took in her mature years. He ambled into town pedaling samples at Patel Brothers, our big supermarket, and met Lydia who was there to satisfy her penchant for baked goods. Their connection was instant, the kind that ignites wonderment experienced in childhood when you run wild, guffaw, snot-cry, dream, scream, glow, gloom, glum, fueled with joy, madness, sadness, and simply be, free. It was God given love. In Afrikaans we say it comes from ‘anderkant die berge’, beyond the mountains. Or as Lydia said of Leon on the day she buried him, he was her imaginary friend come to life, the one she ran with through golden mielie fields, who took her by the hand to play a last time, he the pure-hearted alcoholic, and she, wayward. And when she threw a final rose on his coffin, she wept loudly, then softly, then no more.
Here, take a look – a photo of the two of them on their stoep in Molteno, their wry smiles saying, I know something you don’t.
And here is a photo of Lydia when she was young. A true beauty. None of her daughters or granddaughters take after her. In fact, my daughter, Lydiatjie, nicknamed small Lydia, is her replica, made so by the phenomena of bloodlines. You see, bloodlines don’t flow languidly, they splatter, spatter and spit, horizontally, vertically and haphazardly, skipping over generations, crash-rolling into some, pouring into others, a phenomenon that the white man of this country could not accept, a phenomenon that apartheid could not erase.
And so ends my story.
Would you like a koeksister? It’s been dipped in syrup and coconut. Or perhaps you’d like to use the facilities? Where did you drive in from? Mozambique? That’s a ways away. And why are you handing me the hefty envelope that you’ve been clutching so tightly since you walked in?
It is addressed to Lydia Hayworth.
You want me to gift it to Lydia and Yusuf’s twins, Miriam and Yasmin. They are around, both married, two children each and living on the other side of town, near the public swimming pools and tennis courts, by the bigger houses with the bigger yards and the bigger problems.
I don’t open mail not addressed to me, but as you insist, I’ll make an exception. Do pass my reading glasses, behind you, in the crack of the sofa.
Let me see. It says…
But this is the proof, the evidence that Lydia…
So, it wasn’t an accident.
He was murdered.
This is quite the pickle, a spurting sour pickle. If brought to light, it will result in re-opening the inquiry into Yusuf’s death and the others who died in the same manner. There will be questions, cover-ups, wounds re-opened, pains re-lived. But truth comes at a high price, like freedom, paid for with blood and bodies, too many, the land unable to hold. On second thought, given the TRC that heard truths about apartheid, found no foul play and determined that Yusuf’s death was an accident, I’d say what we have in the envelope is not a pickle, it is spicy atchar, bunched and bottled in masala, like the kind sold by Aunty Fatima of the green grocers. I’ll buy a batch and label it with your name to take back to Mozambique.
What is your name?
You, the granddaughter of the handler from Mozambique? The grand-daughter of Yusuf and Sibusiso’s handler?
Of course it’s a story I want to hear! And start from when Lydia met your grandfather. She did meet your grandfather, yes? Otherwise, how did you come by the envelope? How did you know to come looking?
Your grandmother? That’s a twist I did not see coming, or as we say in my business, it’s the kind of plot that calls for another round of tea. But before I put the kettle on, do you hear that sound? Not the tinkling of wind chimes on the stoep. Listen. It’s the sound of laughter in the heavens, Lydia’s and Yusuf’s and Sibusiso’s laughter, and your grandfather the handler’s, and your grandmother.
I, too, am laughing. Because in all my years of storytelling, I’ve never woven an ending like the one in your envelope, an ending that comes from ‘anderkant die berge’, beyond the mountains.

What the Trumpeter Said

Karl Luntta

Moses was under some strain, that was evident. Not that he talked about it, but it’s something you notice, especially in a friend – the quick movements, the darting eyes, the unfocused gazes. The way they’re quick to complain about the absurdities only worried people worry about.
“You see the goats,” he said (in his newly frenetic sort of way). “Their eyes, you see? On opposite sides of their heads, one eye this side looking at God knows what, while the other stares in the completely opposite direction. They can stand in one place and see sunrise and sunset and never move their heads. It is absurd isn’t it.”
“It’s evolution,” Mzichoe said. “Take it up with Darwin. And what goat stands in place all day to watch sunrise and sunset? This would be a stupid goat.”
So the anxieties were there, certainly. Mzichoe noticed it, too, and we thought what men always think in these situations. It was either caused by a woman or could be cured by a woman.
We were wrong.
Moses was, generally, a quiet man, given to wearing worn, button-down oxford shirts, oversize glasses, and his old army beret, all for an exaggerated bohemian effect. He was a musician and a poet, and a farmer, working his mother’s land and tending their cattle in our village in north-central Botswana. He spent much of his spare time writing poetry and playing soulful trumpet.
Moses played trumpet with a mute, the dripping blues he called it, while I played bad alto sax and Mzichoe hammered on goatskin drums for a sort of jazzy tribal effect. We’d get together to jam once in a while.
In this part of Africa trumpets do not grow on trees. Moses said he’d picked it up in Johannesburg when he was on leave during the time he was doing his two years in the Botswana Defence Force.
One day, he came back to the village from nearby Francistown with a new pick-up truck. He showed it off, took people for rides, and when I asked him about it, he said it had been a good year in the cattle markets. But I knew it had been precisely the opposite, a bad year for selling cattle, a bad year for everyone. It was a curious lie.
Later he returned to the village with hardcover books and sacks of sugar and flour and dozens of baby chicks for a hen coop, and new dresses and head scarfs for his mother. In the next few weeks, he had his first cell phone, new running shoes, and, importantly, a flugelhorn.
On a sweltering, dusty day, he and his new truck pulled up to the village’s Oyster Bar where I sat with Mzichoe at an outside patio table. We were both teachers in the village secondary school and had had a long day in the classrooms. Moses, barely as tall as the truck’s roof, walked over and sat down. He ordered his usual orange squash.
“Boys,” he said, “I am out of sorts.”
Out of deference to me, Mzichoe and Moses spoke English.
“What is it, my friend?” Mzichoe said.
But Moses simply stared at him and shook his head, blinking rapidly. Mzichoe kneed me under the table, a gesture that signaled “Now it’s serious.”
“Why do you think they call this the Oyster Bar?” Moses said.
We discussed it for a minute and concluded that the bar owner, having never seen a live oyster–our village was at the edge of the Kalahari Desert–felt that oysters had something to do with good health, or beauty.
“Don’t they look like, you know, women parts, Kevin?” Moses said.
“‘Is that in the Platonic ideal sense?” I said.
“No, in the vagina sense. You’re an American, you’ve seen them isn’t it.”
“Which?”
“You clearly have to know both to make any comparison,” Mzichoe said.
“Then, yes, I have.”
“And?” Moses said.
“Well, of course women in general are truly beautiful. Oysters, not so much,” I said, but Moses was already distracted, looking over his shoulder.
He balled his hands into fists and brought them to his forehead with a thud. “What can I do?” he said.
“About vaginas?” Mzichoe said. “Good Lord, why even ask? We are simple men, easily confused by these things.”
“No, no. About … what I’ve done.”
Which was when our iamb-inclined friend Moses told us about his career as a stone-cold bank robber.
He spoke softly, and tears often threatened to spill into the story, but he talked quickly, as if at the confessional. He spoke as people do when they’re distributing their burdens.
He had stolen his service weapon from his unit when he had finished his tour in the country’s defense force, and had kept it for just the right moment. Which was, apparently, to rob as many as nine banks countrywide over the last two years. He had recently robbed a payroll truck near Gaborone, the capitol.
“You can’t be telling us this,” Mzichoe said. “You’re the one we’ve been reading about?”
“Unfortunately, it’s all true,” Moses said. “I am telling you because I’m in trouble. The last one, the driver was an old army mate of mine, and he recognized me. I hit him with the rifle. I think I hurt him.”
“But,” Mzichoe said, “you are not a bank robber. You’re a poet.”
“What is poetry but theft,” Moses said. “You steal from the soul, rob from the heart, your plunder transferred to the blankest pages of your dreams.”
“Oh, God,” Mzichoe said.
“Sorry, I can’t help myself.”
“Anyway, you must run,” Mzichoe said. “It’s clear.”
Moses looked at us blankly for a moment, and he seemed to contemplate the enormity of the crimes. “I can’t hide in this country. It’s too small. My mother would be alone.”
“But the police know you by now,” Mzichoe said. And for the next ten minutes I kept silent as Mzichoe, switching to Setswana, counseled the now-sobbing Moses on how to handle his predicament.
Moses stood abruptly as he wiped the tears from his cheek. He shook my hand and said, “Kevin, it has been my pleasure to play music with you.”
He turned to Mzichoe. “Thank you, my friend. And if you ever need my help, for anything, you can call on me. If not today, if not tomorrow, then someday. I will be there for you.”
And he stepped back to his truck.
Mzichoe would later tell me he’d advised Moses to flee to Zimbabwe and never return, or to turn himself in to the Botswana authorities and get it over with. We’ll never know which advice he took because the next day, as he was about to board a train at the Francistown station, he was apprehended by the police. Where he was headed is still unclear, but he’s now serving eighteen hard years for armed robbery, and his mother is doing four for aiding and abetting. Word is they allowed him to take his flugelhorn to prison.
Mzichoe was of course shaken by it. Moses had been a lifelong friend, though both had gone their separate ways for a number of years: Mzichoe to university in Auckland to study English, and Moses to the armed forces to, apparently, steal his gun to rob banks. They had been close and Mzichoe was disturbed by the deception and more than just a little by the fact that he hadn’t seen it happening.
And it was Moses who had introduced Mzichoe to the woman who became his wife, who was Moses’s distant cousin, and who, at the very moment Moses was telling us his robbery story, was somewhere off in the village sleeping with our constable, John Dube.
Mzichoe is the sort of man people come to as they confront their problems. He is like many people in this world who elicit trust: tall, with a deep voice, regal in a certain way. He’s the only college graduate in the village, and this makes him wise to the touch. Often, children, upon instruction from their mothers, sneak tugs and pulls at his coat sleeves and fingers in the hopes of having his erudition rub off on them.
Mzichoe told me why he came back to his small, bush village to teach after having spent five years at a New Zealand university.
“It was Naladi,” he said. His wife.
He was constantly dumfounded by her. He couldn’t fathom her affair with Dube, the constable, who was also married. He couldn’t fathom her blatancy. She might have thought he had no idea about it, but the whole village had seen it which made her actions all the more treacherous.
“People used to come to me for some sort of, what, advice,” he said. “Now they come to look into my eyes, to see the soul of a coward.” We were again at the outdoor patio of the Oyster Bar, his wife apparently again with Dube, somewhere in the village.
“Look at me,” he said. “Does it show? Are fool men like me betrayed by their very own eyes?”
“I once had a girlfriend who cheated on me,” I said, stupidly.
“That is stupid,” he said, correctly.
“What I mean to say is that men and women have had this happen to them throughout the ages, and they were no more fools than you and me.”
“Which is not particularly comforting, thank you. I mean, am I not sitting here drinking, acting like a fool, Kevin? Like a coward?”
“You’re only trying to save your marriage,” I said, but it had bothered me for months. Why hadn’t he done something? Had he even talked to her about it?
As happens when people are on the brink of revealing something deeply personal, the atmosphere at our table became thick and we gripped our drinks with both hands.
I tried to help him rationalize. It was not your fault, I said, nor can it be that Dube is a tremendous catch.
“Which makes it worse,” he said. “He is our village’s constable, our law enforcement. We see him every day, the smirking jackass. You know he’s a criminal, technically, for doing this, for this affair?”
“Who’s doing what to whom, though?”
“If you say it takes two to tango,” he said, “I will be forced to violently roll my eyes, on principle.”
I told him that all this may be temporary, that he’s in a position to save the marriage if he acts, and if he forgives – if he wants to forgive.
He leaned back and took a deep draught of his beer. “Fine, that’s it,” he said and slammed the empty to the table. He stood up. “Are you coming?”
“Uhm, yes?” I said. “Where to?”
“It’s time for this absurdity to end,” he said. “I’m going to find her. Time to talk.”
“Okay, fine. But do you really want me there?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never done this before. But if ever I needed a friend, I need one now,” he said. “What do you call it, a wingman.”
“That’s one definition,” I said.
He sat back down. “You know, first maybe another drink would help.”
“That I can help with.”
One beer and some minor sobbing later, he said, “I am coming apart.”
“I see that,” I said.
“This affair, this betrayal, it’s existential to me. As a man.” His head hit the table again.
“Then let’s have another beer.”
“Good thinking,” he said from below.
“Let me ask you this, do you still love her?”
He lifted his head. “Are you joking, my friend? After all this, after she’s had another man, after she’s rubbed my dignity in cow dung? Of course, I still love her.”
I pitied him at that moment, his head on the table, wife in the throes of whatever. “That’s the horror of it,” I said. “Love is just an endorsement of the Stockholm syndrome.”
We sipped, and in the distance heard a siren, one of those whoop-whoop types you hear in movie car chases set in Berlin. It wasn’t completely unheard of in our little village but was the type of thing you notice.
Mzichoe frowned. At that moment a small group of boys, all students, walked by on the dusty road past the bar’s patio where we were seated. Mzichoe called to them. They were happy to trot over to speak to the teacher.
“Boys,” he said, “I am looking for Constable Dube’s car, you know, his jeep which says ‘Botswana Police’ on it. I want you to go and look for it for me, I want to know where it is right now. It should be easy, there are only about two dozen cars in this whole village. Who knows what a dozen is?”
“Always the teacher,” I said.
One boy raised his hand. “Yes, Pono,” Mzichoe said.
“One dozen equals twelve, sir.”
“Very good.”
The boys gave no indication they knew why Mzichoe was interested in the constable’s jeep. They all nodded, eager to do this important task for their teacher. He handed them each a few coins and it was like Christmas. They beamed.
“And come back and tell me where they are. I mean, where the jeep is.”
The boys took off running.
“He is parked somewhere,” Mzichoe said, “at someone’s compound, or they’re off in the bush somewhere. God knows.”
“What will you do when you find out?” I said.
“That, too, only God knows.”
Five minutes passed, and a crowd of villagers appeared on the road, walking in the direction of the siren, buzzing like a wasp nest. People in huts next to the road began to step out, and, after shouting a few questions, joined the crowd.
“Something is up,” Mzichoe said.
The boys appeared again, running against the throng, and stepped back onto the patio, breathless.
“That was fast,” Mzichoe said.
The boy Pono, their spokesman, said between the panting, “Sir, the constable’s jeep is at the kgosi’s compound.” The chief’s compound.
“Where is the constable?” Mzichoe said.
“He is in the dirt, sir,” Pono said.
“What do you mean?” Mzichoe said.
“I mean soil, sir. I mean he is lying on the ground, sir. Bleeding.”
We stood up.
I knew Mzichoe wouldn’t ask it, but I had to know, and I have no impulse control anyway. “Did you see teacher’s wife?”
The boys turned to Mzichoe as one, then as one looked down to examine their toes.
“She is there,” Pono said to his feet. “She is crying.”
“Let’s go,” Mzichoe said, and we turned to join the crowd.
When we arrived at the kgosi’s compound, the crowd was growing and murmuring, and stealing glances at Mzichoe. Through the throng we could see Dube’s feet. He lay on the ground and men gathered around him. They were next to his police jeep. The driver’s door was open.
Details are not important at this point, and I’m hazy on them anyway–could have been the fast-moving events, but the gist of it was this: Dube comes wheeling up to the chief’s compound in his police jeep, an apparently terrified Naladi at his side. He demands to see the kgosi because he apparently needs some chiefly advice STAT. He is deeply agitated. People bring him into the kgosi’s hut. They speak. Dube wants to marry Naladi. He loves her more than anything, more than his own wife, more than the Earth and stars, more than God Himself. The kgosi says that is irrelevant, love has nothing to do with this, and do not take God’s name in vain. This is another man’s wife, and you are breaking trust with that man and with your own wife. The chief tells him the true sign of a man’s strength is in giving up the things he cannot have. Dube grows silent, then says, strength? I will show you strength. He pulls a skinning knife from his back pocket. He repeats, you want strength? He plunges the knife into his thigh. The entire hut screams. The kgosi says you really are an idiot, aren’t you.
Dube staggers outside with the knife embedded in his leg, blood spouting from his wound. He opens the door of his jeep. Pulls out an AK-47. Naladi screams. Dube hits the whoop-whoop siren. People poke their heads out of nearby huts. They pause on the village paths. Everything stops. He places the rifle barrel under his chin and again shouts, I will show you strength. Naladi screams. He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. Naladi screams. He pulls the trigger again. Click. Naladi cannot stop.
In short order the chief’s people wrestle the rifle and knife away from Dube, who collapses to the ground, a bloody wreck. The district police are summoned, and in an hour or two they come to collect the blubbering constable, who will never again be seen in the village.
Within days Naladi comes to the sobering but inevitable realization that she cannot stick around. Small African villages have implacable memories. Mzichoe agrees, painfully but with resolve, and Naladi soon disappears to stay with relatives in the south. Mzichoe and the constable’s wife become the reluctant heroes of the saga and, no, poetic justice does not demand that they get together in the absence of their recalcitrant spouses. There is too much pain there for any rebound relationship.
But here’s the thing. About a month after Dube misfired his intent, Mzichoe and I were at the field behind the school. I was coaching the volleyball team and Mzichoe had the school’s bare-footed soccer team running through their warm-ups. He’d become quieter over the weeks, adjusting to his newly ruined marriage, but he’d managed to keep up with his schoolwork and his new life.
“There’s one thing I still want to know,” I said. “One of many things, actually. What was with the AK-47?”
“It wasn’t Dube’s police weapon, that’s for sure,” Mzichoe said. “I think the police in Botswana barely have three pistols among them.”
“But where did he get–“
“Do you hear that?” he said.
“Hear what?”
“In the distance. The sound of the dripping blues.”
Indeed, it was. I heard it.
“Dube was an arresting officer earlier this year,” Mzichoe said, “when that notorious bank robber was apprehended in Francistown. His home in this very village was searched for evidence.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And it appears that sometime later, Moses’s AK-47 fell out of the evidence locker.”
“I can’t stand the ironies.” I actually can stand the ironies.
“Irony was not unfamiliar to Moses,” Mzichoe said. “And I think it was entirely his style to rob banks with an unloaded gun. It was muted, so to speak.”
“But how could a policeman not know it was unloaded?”
“It’s a fundamental rule, a man never realizes he’s impotent until it’s too late. That, and Dube is a moron. He couldn’t shoot himself to save himself. Or maybe he did know the gun was unloaded, and that whole scene was performance, the cheap, ersatz melodrama of a coward.”
“I’ll go with door number one.”
“Pardon?”
“It’s an American thing.”
“Anyway,” Mzichoe said, “I look at it this way. Fate is neither cruel nor charitable, it is simply relentless. It resolves everything. Moses was destined to help in some way, it was the last thing he said to me.”
“But how did he help?”
“His unloaded gun both saved Dube’s life and made a fool of him. That restored the balance of power in that little triptych of ours. Moses returned my dignity to me.”
A soccer ball rolled up to Mzichoe’s feet, and he said, “You want strength? I’ll show you strength.”
He kicked it back to the field, and Pono intercepted it and dribbled toward the goal.

# # #

Whine of a Dog

Rory Kilalea

A yellow haze hid the kopjes. A lonely farmhouse on the arid veldt.
Madge sighed. Too hot and still, as hours gnawed away at the blistering ranch.
She could smell the dust.
No rain. Another drought.
Too familiar, the ground was cracked, the sad garden insulted her, breathed dry futility. She tried to wait patiently, to force coolness over her, to wait for Ted, to relax with him on the veranda, to have their drink.
Just to sit. There would be very little to say. The air was too heavy, like the day.
Shadows grew across her, a dumpy woman leaning against the door, in a thin cotton shift
clinging to her shape. Attempts at freshness, of trying to be attractive for Ted, never worked.
The heat had drained out her vanity, demanded comfort, survival, instead. She loosened the
sash around her waist and watched the light grow low. A scratch behind her. The dogs
whined at the door, trying to get through to the kitchen. She trusted Ridgebacks. Good guard
dogs.
‘What is it, boy? What’s wrong?’
The hair on Sheba’s back was raised, angry.
‘O.K. boy, let’s see.’
She pushed the door open. A burly black man. Startled, she stood still.
‘What do you want?’
He walked in. The two dogs snarled low beside her. She just had to give them the command.
‘You can’t come in!’ Her sternest voice, trying to cover confusion.
Ted’s boss boy, he had no right to be in her kitchen. Her cook was behind, signalled a
warning. ‘He wants the boss.’ Ellis said.
The black man was rigid, immovable in her kitchen.
‘The Boss?’
The intruder stared at her. She felt physically weak, threatened.
‘He isn’t here. Show him out Ellis.’ Voice cracked.
He dominated, mocked her pretense. Her eyes appealed to the cook.
Ellis opened the door, but the intruder didn’t move.
He stood and smirked. ‘I will wait.’
He talked directly to her, at her. Brazen. Blacks shouldn’t do that.
‘Get out or I’ll set the dogs on you.’
The boss boy’s smirk deepened. Anger flickered in her, frustrated a black wouldn’t do as she
told him.
‘Watch the Kaffir, Sheba.’ She snapped at the dog. ‘Stay with him, Ellis!’
That would teach him a lesson, make him stand there until Ted got home. She half turned to
say something else, recoiled at his leering challenge.
‘I will wait,’ he said.
Ellis averted his eyes.
She went through to the veranda, leaving the growling dogs behind her. She was shaking. She
should have been sterner. She should have forced him to leave the kitchen, told him to wait
on the back step.
In the back of her mind, she found trembling excuses, but his words haunted her. ‘I will
wait’. When Ted came back from the lands, she would feel safe again, remove the taste of
fear.
Ellis was busy again in the kitchen. The sound of ice crackling made her feel better. Perhaps
the Boss boy had gone.
‘Ellis. Bring the drinks.’
‘Yes, Medemh.’
At least he was a good boy; she did not feel threatened by him. He was a picannin when she
taught him cooking and housework. Years ago. His wife lived with him at the compound and
one child attended the farm school. She had seen the family once. A shy young woman
at the back door, a snotty nosed child wrapped to her back in a towel.
The tray of drinks clinked past, as evening light picked up the trail of Ted’s truck. Swirling,
settling like a blanket over the scrub, the only movement in the veldt
Madge pushed her hair back into place, a usual tired gesture.
‘Baas is too late tonight, Medemh.’
His dark face was tight.
‘Is Boss boy still there?’ Blurted, trying to be offhand, she threw the question at him.
‘Yes Medemh.’
Her chest tightened.
‘But I get dogs to take him outside.’
She breathed easier. He was out of her house, at least.
‘You got the dogs to take him out?’ A flash of irritation.
‘Yes Medemh.’
‘Why does he want the boss?’
Ellis shuffled his feet, avoided eye contact.
‘He drink too much, not come to work. ‘
Ted’s truck shot around the house, pulling up at the back door. The wait was over; tension
slid from her shoulders. The dogs barked, echoed through the house. The master was home.
They had protected the homestead.
‘Quiet Sheba, quiet!’
A momentary check at the sound of her voice, the dogs wagged their tails, and continued
barking through the gauze door. They wanted to get to the intruder standing on the step,
squaring up to their master.
‘Hsst.’
The dogs turned to Ellis, immediately obedient.
Madge felt defeated. She could not even control her dogs.
Sagging into the wicker chair, she knew it would be ugly outside, boss boy would be beaten.
He frightened her. This one was different. Something in his eyes.
She was halfway through her gin when Ted stalked through, burnt and hot.
‘Bloody Kaffirs. Get more cheeky every day.’
He wiped the sweat off his brow with his hat.
‘Didn’t show up for work again today.
Ted poured his beer, watched the foam rise to the top, dissolving the glass to gold.
‘Bloody cheek. Soon knocked that out of him. Paid his wages–minus time off.’ He chuckled.
‘Wasn’t much left after that.’
Ted was in control again. The black man was gone.
‘Sheba. Come!’ Ted’s voice was gruff. Low.
The dogs came belting through, nuzzling Ted, vying for attention. He played with them
roughly, pulling, squeezing their ears, gouging his large hands through their coat until they
whined in pain.
‘Dinner Medemh.’ Ellis was behind them, a shadow in the dusk.
The dogs yelped away from Ted, tails shivering.
They headed for Ellis, dog tails thumping against the concrete floor. Madge felt defeat prick
at her again.
They ate in silence until she told Ted that Ellis could control the dogs. ‘What good are the
dogs as guards?’ She said.
‘Ellis! ‘He bellowed.
Ellis’s eyes stabbed at her, hurt, bewildered.
‘Leave those bloody dogs alone. They are white dogs, not bloody Kaffir dogs.’
Madge prayed he would not hit him.
He threw back his chair, strode from the table to the drinks cabinet.
‘Bloody Kaffirs. Give them an inch and they take a bloody mile.’ He downed a whisky.
The night was ruined. She went to the kitchen, stacked the dishes.
Ellis glided through the house, shutting the windows, drawing the curtains.
Ted shouldered his rifle, waited for Ellis to finish so he could lock the security gate behind
him. ‘Hurry up. I’m not here all bloody night.’

He watched the stooped shoulders slouch past him. All blacks were alike. He bolted the gate and with a final click fastened the padlock.
Ellis heard Ted pocket the key and shout at the dogs muzzling him, knocking the rifle off his
shoulder. Saw him kick them out of his way. They always returned to him, always mistook
his anger for attention, always followed him, cowed by his blows.
As he approached the compound, the farm generator died down, the lights in the bedroom
faded, flickered, and went out.
Ellis loved the smell of the compound. It was home. Maize meal cooking, sweet smoke from
the fire.
‘Here is the white man’s cook boy. ‘
Boss boy’s face leered through the flames.
‘I am not the white man’s boy,’ Ellis said.
The guffaw was loud.
Ellis stared at Hondo. He brought trouble to their compound.
Hondo boasted and drank. How he and his comrades were going to get rid of the whites, the
remaining colonial oppressors. The ones occupying their land. Ellis felt the words were thrown at him. He felt jeering eyes. and saw how the young men of the village were seduced by promises of houses, cars for everyone.
The white man was boss during the day, Hondo at night.
After eating, Ellis stood up, dusted off his clothes, and ushered his wife away.
‘White boy, I have a job for you.’
The muscles in Ellis’ shoulders tensed, but he continued walking.
A metallic click.
‘Turn around, houseboy.’
The voice was harsh, sharp.
Ellis pushed his wife ahead of him, towards the hut. Then he turned. The gun was no surprise.
His young son peered over Hondo’s shoulder at the weapons laid out on the ground.
‘Get away from i-parasite!’ Ellis spat.
The child took fright and ran to his mother. The weapon moulded to Hondo’s hands, aimed at
Ellis’ head.
‘You have a pretty young wife.’ A murmur from the crowd. ‘I have been without a woman
for some time.’
‘Wena ma Inja! I curse you!’ Ellis snapped. ‘Son of a dog!’
A whispered intake.
Hondo’s chest heaved. He would not kill the cook boy now, the farmer would hear, his plans
would be ruined.
Ellis felt the gun press against his head, could smell the beer on Hondo’s breath.

Hondo’s voice was tight, like a rasp. ‘Those whites have stolen our land. We will take this
farm. It is ours.’
‘Then we won’t have jobs. You are just doing it for money.’
The workers went silent.
Hondo laughed. ‘You can farm this place! It will be yours. You do not need a white boss.’
‘Yebo,’ said a young man, fired up with hope.
Hondo stalked back and forth in front of the workers.
‘Tomorrow night, cook boy, you will tie up the dogs.’
Ellis remembered. ‘They’re not bloody Kaffir dogs. They’re white dogs.’
‘You will steal the key to the gate.’
‘I will not.’
Ellis heard the crack and tasted the blood in his mouth. He rolled the tongue around the inside
of his teeth. His scorn laughed at Hondo.
Another crack, this time to the back of his neck, and he sprawled in the dust. He turned over,
the automatic rifle aimed at his groin.
‘You want to play with your young wife again, white man’s boy?’
The crowd was silent.
The rifle butt crushed into him, cracked a hollow pain in the pit of his stomach.
The crowd laughed now, raw, and cruel in their power.
The cry of his child tugged him back, he saw his wife crying at the hut.
Hondo’s harsh voice imitated the white madam. ‘Go home now, cook boy, play with your
wife.’
Long into the night, drunken voices of the men droned, rising to laughter, drifting into the
blackness of his hut.
‘Those whites will see what we suffer without freedom. This land is ours.’
Hondo sprawled, pushed towards the dying embers of heat, his last night at this compound;
tomorrow he would join the comrades for an invasion of the neighboring farms in the area.
‘Leave the gate open, cook boy. Tonight, I will have my revenge.’
Hondo laughed. ‘Don’t tell your boss, Ellis. You will find your family dead if you do!’
He looked at the villagers.
‘We’ll have plenty of cattle,’ he said to the village. ‘And it will be ours.’

Ellis reached out to his wife. He traced the features of her face tenderly with his hands.
‘We will leave. Meet me at the house. Five o’clock. Tomorrow. Let no one see you come.’
Her face softened, reassured.
Early morning seemed reluctant to lighten the sky, and Ellis felt the path longer and steeper.
He paused to ease the pain in his groin from where Hondo had hit him, looked at the farmhouse where he had worked for most of his life.
The rusted tin roof fitted into the bush, no longer new and strange. A tangle of creepers and
brown metal gauze hid yellowed walls of the veranda. Madam insisted on neatness and
tidiness in the early years.
No longer.
He trudged on. He would work slowly, he would not clean out the stove, the bending would hurt.
The gate was still locked. He slumped to the rock beside the gate—the path had been painful.
He could smell the flowers of a tree she had planted. She called it a Temple Flower. It
reminded him of death, of burning bodies. Sweet and sick.
‘Bloody Kaffir dogs.’
With a crash the dogs came pelting from the kitchen, lumbered to the gate, tails wagging
furiously. They whined at Ellis, and he reached out to pat them, as he normally did, then his
hand faltered, returned to his pocket.
‘Come here!’
The door of the kitchen creaked. Ted stepped down heavily and aimed a kick at the nearest
dog, sending it yelping away.
‘Kaffir lover.’
Ellis watched the thick stubby fingers, clumsy with the small key, as he had watched him
many times before. This man was always the same, not like some whites, who would turn on
you like a snake; this man hated him. Ellis felt safe in the knowledge.
The gate screeched open, and Ellis limped through.
‘Morning Baas.’
The key, wired to a worn piece of wood, clattered against the padlock.
Ellis heard him click the padlock over the mesh. He would keep the key in his pocket the rest
of the day. Madam had the other on her bunch of keys.
Ted watched the cook struggle up the steps and flicked the cigarette into the grass.
He was a large-framed man, a sweat-stained hat as much part of him as his paunch, his baggy
khaki trousers, and the lips burnt into his face. Blue eyes, cold, almost lashless, in a tired
face, forced red by a harsh shave.
The sun had come up, shooting horizontal rays across the scrub, and Ted wondered how long
they could hold out on the farm. He had lost three hundred cattle from rustling. He kicked the
gate, sending a chain effect shivering down the mesh. Security fencing, screens against the
windows, the costs weighed heavier and heavier. To protect what? Not what they hoped. He
cursed the country for what it had done to him. He was now too old to recover any money,
and even if he sold up, they had nowhere to go. They were both born in Africa. This was their
home. And now you had government thugs, paid by corrupt politicians to force farmers off
their land to share money from the sale of equipment.
He clicked the weapon to safety, creaked open the door to the kitchen and picked up the tray
of tea things.
‘Tea’s ready,’ he called to her. He bumped his elbow on the door to the veranda. ‘Fuck!’ as
hot tea burnt his legs.
His hands shook as he poured into flowered cups. ‘Too many dops, last night,’ he thought.
Ellis watched him, sipping his tea, as the slow trickle of labourers spread out in a fan from the
compound.
Ellis knew this was the time to betray Hondo, when the farmer was alone, before she came
through. He started forward, then stopped. He wanted to tell them he was honest, that he’d
worked with them for a long time, he would never lie. He was loyal. They should help him.
The farmer turned and stared past him. Did not notice him. Did not even see him.
The distance between them was too far.
Madge bustled through, hand neatening the back of her hair, the other smoothing down her
frock the way she had done every day for years.
‘Bacon and egg, Ellis.’
Madge grasped her cup of tea. The mood of the night had lifted somewhat. She felt today
would be better.
He was looking at the fields, watching the last workers join the others.
‘More tea?’
She took the cup from him, touched his fingers for a moment.
‘Bloody laugh. Army says the place is clear, then ten more bloody mombies disappeared
yesterday. They are all in it- army, police, politicians. Steal our mombies then sell them.’
He drained his tea on the way out.
‘No lunch. I’ll meet the other farmers. We will put a stop to this rustling. With guns. These bastards won’t get away with this. We have to take matters into our own hands.’
Madge picked at breakfast, her mood down again. She scraped her chair back.
‘Clean those, Ellis.’ She lumped the dishes on to the sink and fumbled for her bunch of keys.
The Yale lock clicked, as she opened the door to the dark pantry. It smelled of cloves and Allspice. Madge squinted at the wooden shelves. She pulled down ingredients, glad to find them full, without weevils, and carried them out to the dresser.
‘Ellis cut up some pumpkin for me. Nice and small.’
Ellis stacked up the plates, hands shaking. A stab of pain in his groin suddenly shot through
him, and they crashed to the floor.
Madge wheeled around, saw the shattered crockery. It was useless to shout, they were
broken, but she was frightened for Ellis, leaning against the wall, trembling.
‘What is it, Ellis?’ He clutched his stomach in agony.
She marched down the passage to the medicine cabinet.
Ellis swallowed the growing rush of nausea; he could not give in now; he must escape with
his family. He had to save them. He braced himself against the sink, reached for the keys in
the pantry door.
Madge headed for the kitchen, half a dozen aspirin in her hand. She paused when she saw
Ellis at the sink near the pantry. Why did he move?
‘I needed to wet my face, Medemh.’
‘You should have used the outside tap. Not my sink!’
She placed the painkillers into his cupped hands, ‘Take these Ellis. Two.’
He headed towards the outside tap with his cup. The dogs lying in the shade wagged their
tails at him as he drank. Then he limped to the fence. He hid the key near the gate near
madam’s tree.
Madge cut up the pumpkin, baked the pie, and sprinkled cinnamon on the top. The smell put
her in a lighter mood.
The swinging bunch of keys caught her attention, and she relocked the pantry.
When she sat down for her afternoon tea, she felt she had accomplished something. She
examined the room over the edge of the cup, the gun cabinet bolted to the wall, the faded
photographs of their first day on the farm. Their dreams. Her hope died when she saw the
pole and dagga hut, their first home in the heat. Ted blustered it was only temporary, but it
wasn’t. They were always struggling for dreams, for hope. But she knew Ted’s purpose , felt
part of him, part of the challenge of something new. That kept her alive.
She swallowed the last of her tea and wandered over to the photographs, their glass filmed in
dust. There was a musty smell. She must get Ellis to clean properly. The wedding photo,
wiped with a flick of her smock, made her smile – the two of them sitting in formal pose,
pretending to be what they weren’t. No recent photos. No need. They had grown older,
weathered together—Ted had thrived in the heat, she hadn’t. Now, failure had become a
habit.
‘Excuse Medemh.’ An involuntary shiver.
‘Are you better?’
He was not shaking, but he was uneasy.
‘Supper Medemh?’
The day had sauntered by. She got up from the chair.
‘Cut up the potatoes and the carrots, Ellis. Chicken tonight.’
She cracked out the ice into a cut glass bowl, next to the gin. Ted would like the pumpkin pie.
Ellis watched her go to the veranda. He looked at the kitchen clock. It was time to meet his
wife.
A noise outside, and Ellis stopped, peered through the gauze, thought he saw a bulky figure
bend over the stone by the gate.
He pushed open the door, and the dogs lumbered in, wagging their backs at him. Ellis bent
down automatically, stroked them both, and they charged through the house, delirious at
being inside again. He sat down on the step and watched, waiting for his family to arrive at the gate. The smell of the compound fire blew up to the farmhouse, familiar and sad.
The gate of the fence looked like a shadow underneath the tree. Not real.
The dusk crept up into early night. He started at a low cry, listened, too late to see his wife
and children forced back to the compound by a large man.
Madge watched the dusk creep into the hills, and patted the dogs idly, wondered where Ted
was. Cradling her gin, she stepped into the memory of her garden and watched the restless
dogs whining, playing with shadows, rolling in the khaki weed. She taught Ellis to crush the
leaves and mix it with floor polish to keep away the fleas. A long time ago.
The darkness suddenly frightened her, tightened the knot to run inside.
Ted was late.
She worried about him. The strain of the ranch, no money, had scarred him, extra gin in his
drink did not help.
When she saw the faint yellow eyes of the truck prick through the darkness, she poured
herself another gin.
The truck swept past the trees and lurched to a halt. Madge began to smile, was cut short.
‘Is the alert on?’ Ted stalked to the alarm set. He pressed the red button, signalling all farms
And the police on the circuit, ‘Ted Coetzee, Impala Range.’
The seconds delayed, freezing them.
‘Anytime something real comes up, they take bloody hours.’ Madge knew the drill, went to
the gun cabinet, as he shouted his call sign through again, watched him stamp his feet
restlessly.
‘Charlie Tangos sighted! Heading towards my farm. A large bunch of them. Armed.’
His tone was brutal, hard.
‘Sighting. About 10, maybe more. Assemble at my compound. It’s time we showed these guys…’
She reached for the shotgun off the rack. Ted’s thick hands checked it over for her,
automatic, brusque.
‘I’ve alerted the army as well. Not that those bastards will come. They’re in it for the money as well.’
The air felt heavy, suffocating. Madge covered Ted with her shotgun as he went to the gate.
She thought about the roast; she must take it out before it was burnt.
Ted loomed up out of the gloom. He chucked her under the chin. She was pale.
‘O.K. It will be fine.’
He bent down and squeezed her, and she leant against him, drawing strength.
Government terrorists had come to her home. There was no one to turn to.
‘Medemh.’ The knocking on the kitchen door was urgent.
‘The Baas. He’s locked the gate; I must go home.’ The appeal in his face was painful. She
looked to Ted for an answer.
‘He’ll have to stay. There will be shooting at the compound. He’ll be safer here.’
He pressed the spring on his magazine, belted on his pouches, turned to Madge with his gin.
He felt a stab of guilt. They should have had a vigilante on the farm as protection for her. He
shrugged. The expense was not worth it.
Madge watched him pull away in a choking billow of dust, the dogs whining as he locked the
gate behind him. She could smell the roast. She must take it out.
‘Cut some bread, Ellis, and make your tea.’ She said.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t; his wife had not arrived. As he boiled the kettle, droplets
glistened in the furrows of his face.
The key was under a stone outside the gate; he could not get out. Only the farmer and Hondo
could get in.
He clicked for the dogs; they came to him, eager for attention, licking at his face. He tied
them to a post at the corner of the house with food. They whined as he melted into the
shadows, hugging the wall, out of sight, waiting for his family.
The stars arched over the farmhouse, sprinkling shadows under the trees, softening the edges.
of despair and age. Ellis did not hear the gate open. He did not see the fence shivering.
Madge sat in the dining room, shotgun cradled tightly against her, alone with the house they
had built together.
She listened to the door creaking restlessly, heard the dogs barking. They were wild. Barking
and whining as if they were tied up. She did not have time to notice the bulky shadow slip
through the open door and blot out the night. Hondo wrenched the gun from her, kicked it
into the kitchen and threw her to the ground.
She felt the pain of her head cracking, looked up dazed, trying to understand why she was on
the floor. Finally, she smelt the shadow in front of her him, recognized his shape, and fear
killed the scream in her throat.
Hondo laughed at the woman whimpering, trying to edge away into the corner.
‘I told you I would wait.’
His hand opened his trousers. She tried to clamber away. He crashed his foot on her leg, the
excitement pushing through him as she clawed wildly, a desperate animal, whimpering.
Ellis heard the woman in pain, groans as her body was beaten and crushed. He stumbled
inside, found Hondo astride her.
Too late.
Ellis limped past the barking dogs, through the open gate with the padlock still swinging. The
path down towards the kraal was painful, every jolt clutching at guilt, fear for his family.
He saw the compound alight, the huts in flames, and explosions of bullets in the burning
thatch.
He staggered to the back of the compound, calling for her, for the children. He smelt the sickly sweet smell of cooking bodies. The smoke from his hut sent him choking back, stumbling through pots and stools, tripping over a soft pile, charred and inert. His streaming eyes focused, and despair spewed from him.
Ted stood with armed farmers in the middle of the burning compound. The raid had been a
success, the thugs killed. The army had not arrived.
‘They won’t kill their comrades.” Spat Ted.
The villagers stood in groups watching their homes light the sky.
Ted caught a movement, wheeled his weapon, levelled at a man standing over three bodies.
He fired over his head.
Ted heard a single name, ‘Medemh’.
Madge was in the house alone with an open gate.
He threw Ellis into the truck and skidded off, crashed the gears through the half open gates,
breaking the hinges. He fought through the dogs, straining at the door, ran into the darkness.
The shadows cut the corners of the kitchen. His foot tapped something on the floor,
something solid. He looked down. Her rifle. Ted felt a terrible silence, felt a stranger.
He edged into the gloom, no movement, no noise.
‘Hssst!’
The dogs stopped barking.
He looked over to the window, into the shadows. Swept his eyes across the dining room table
and froze. A figure slumped over in the chair, head drooping. Frightened to believe, he
strained forward, and touched her, tenderly lifted her heavy head. A slow trickle of blood
oozed from her mouth, dripped from her chin. He hugged the inert form, calling out her name
in terse whispers, unbelieving.
The first shot exploded, hit the back of his leg, crumpling him against the table. Grasping for
his rifle, the next shot took away his arm, knocking the rifle against her broken foot.
‘Try to hit me now.’
Hondo walked out of the shadows.
He laughed, pushed at the stump of the farmer’s arm. He flipped up the corner of the dead
woman’s dress.
‘She was good.’
Ted lunged, to get at the devil’s throat, and fell to the floor. Hondo’s rifle aimed at Ted’s
groin.
‘Get it over with,’ a pinched voice, taut with pain.
Then Ted saw a look of bewilderment flash across Hondo’s face as his chest collapsed in
blood and bone. The cordite of the shotgun hung in the air.
Ellis lifted the gun again and blew Hondo’s body to shreds.
Tears creased the ashes on his cheeks.
Ellis heard his name weakly from the floor. The big man was down, pumping blood across
the red carpet.
The dogs whined to get inside.
Ellis lifted the rifle to the man’s closing eyes.
The temple flower breathed a sick sweet smell near the gate.
A soft wind blew up, crackling the leaves, breaking up shadows creeping on the house,
blowing against the open back door.
Then silence.