by Elsa Joubert
You can’t go home, Mamdungwana’s husband told Poppie. You can’t go out on the street, you must stay here.
Where are your two youngest sons? Mamdungwana asked her husband.
Are they women, are they girls that I should tie them to the house? he answered. They are with the group. Are they still listening to me?
Mamdungwana had grown tired during the past few days. Her boys had left school with the others. Both had already been caught. Some nights they didn’t sleep at home at all. But they didn’t talk to her or to their father.
You are really blessed that your children are not here, she told Poppie.
Poppie thought quietly: How is it that I catch blame for this; it is not of my will that they are not in the Cape.
Mamdungwana’s house was on Zwelitsha Drive near the special quarters of the migrant workers. Only two streets removed from them were the red brick houses where the men lived alone, or lived with the women they had taken here in the Cape. These people had always lived peaceably with the location residents. Tata-ka-Bonsile lived and died there. When Poppie had gone down their street to Mamdungwana’s place the men had looked up from their cooking fires and those that knew her made greetings – there was peace between them. Now they said war was coming. From behind those red brick houses standing between the eucalyptus trees they would leave their fires to come and fight.
In the road between the special quarters and the houses of the residents she saw the jeeps of the riot squad slowly going up and down. Behind the mesh wire in front of the jeep windows she could see the white policemen and the black policemen sitting; she couldn’t see their faces, only the small holes in the mesh through which the guns would point.
The long dusk had become dark. Vukile was fretting. He had a fever and he was crying; he vomited his food. He was no longer satisfied with Kindjie, nor with the girl of thirteen holding him. Only in Poppie’s arms he felt all right. Later on he slept in Poppie’s arms, but she remained awake, looking up at the darkness.
She could feel the restlessness coming out of Mamdungwana like a smell.
Before the dawn she heard the two boys, Tera and Langa, coming in from outside and lying down on the kitchen floor. Mamdungwana was also woken by the quiet noise and she got up to make them tea. Poppie left the sleeping child in the living room and went to the kitchen. The boys didn’t talk, they kept the mugs of tea close to their mouths as if they were cold and wanted to feel the warm moisture rising from the tea. The youngest one sat a little behind his brother, away from his mother. She cut them bread.
After the children had eaten and she lay down again, Poppie heard Mamdungwana going to sleep.
76
Sunday morning Mamdungwana said: Poppie, I don’t feel that we can go to church. Not with all the children. We must keep off the streets.
Round about the middle of the morning Johnnie DropEye and his girl friend arrived at Mamdungwana’s house.
Sisi, we were at your mama’s place looking for you and they said you were here. How are you?
All right, she answered. And it wasn’t mama’s house which got burnt?
No, sisi. But last night we were just as scared because the fighting was near my ma’s house, the girl said. We ran away to Wili’s house in Guguletu; there it was quiet.
Tell mama things are all right, Poppie said, but we don’t know what is going to happen now.
We should have asked Johnnie to take us and the children away, Poppie said when they had gone.
And what about all my stuff in the house? My husband has been away from early morning; I can’t leave everything here, Mamdungwana answered.
Things had again started slowly boiling up in the location; the men stood around in groups, they did not want to leave.
That Sunday, after Johnnie and his girl had left, the thing started, Poppie tells. I saw it all.
Now the city-borners were coming together one by one. They were gathering stones; the children and the young men and the old ones. It was now war against the men of . the special quarters. In the distance I saw a bakkie off-load stones at the special quarters, but where they got the stones I do not know. Stones and broken bricks, and the migrants coming together like flies around dung. The migrants had strips of white cloth around their heads and around their bodies more white cloth; in their hands were their kieries.
They shouted like rain: Come, come let us fight. They were swearing, and the city-borners on our side, they also shouted and swore. Sometimes it looked as if the men wanted to break up and go, then they’d come together again. And all the time the riot squad rode between the groups.
Let us put your stuff together, Poppie told Mamdungwana. We saw how they burnt houses last night. You must try to put everything together, now. We can’t stay here and look after the things.
Poppie had put her children’s things in a plastic bag and put it outside so that she could take it at once if people wanted to burn the house.
She and Mamdungwana carried the furniture outside, because they saw other people doing the same thing.
While they were busy Mamdungwana’s daughter, who worked in Kenilworth, arrived.
What’s going on here?
We’re carrying the stuff outside because it looks as if we are going to have bad fighting, Poppie told her.
No, the daughter said, I have only now come through the location, everything is dead, there are no people nowhere. Maybe it is better if papa takes away mama’s radiogram, and the sideboard and a few things that mama wants taken away. We can store them at the place where I work.
As they drove away the fighting started up; stones and maybe a petrol bomb flew backwards and forwards, and there was terrible shouting, the men were like dogs watching each other. The throwing started, then stopped.
Now I could see the city-borners stand in a line in front of their own houses to protect them from the migrants. It was just like that, Poppie tells, like a hand dropping. Suddenly the riot squad was there, and we heard shots, and the special quarters men shielded themselves behind the riot squad to break through our lines.
The police came in, together with the men from the special quarters. They shot in between the people of the location, and that is why the location people had to fall back.
At the window I was looking through I saw the bottle coming. I saw the arm with the ·white cloth round it that threw the bottle which burnt Mamdungwana’s house. I heard the bottle fall on the roof, then we ran out of the back door.
I had Vukile on my back, Mamdungwana carried the cripple child; she was seven but she had to carry her tied to the back. She had the other children by the hand and we escaped by a back way to other people’s house behind us.
We saw men coming with the white cloth on them; they carried stones and bricks, kieries and other sharp things. Our people ran away because the police had shot at them.
I and Mamdungwana ran into another house and told the children they must hide under the kitchen table because the stones were flying this way, that way, from everywhere. Mamdungwana’s block was burning because they had thrown a lot of petrol bombs at it. All her things, her wardrobes and chests, and her clothes, were burnt, everything but those things which her husband took away in the van; the roof of the house had gone too.
We were standing in the woman’s house, Mamdungwana and I, when the first stone came through the window. Nearly in her face it was, but she only got glass over her chest because the curtains helped. We were going forward to her when stones came through the kitchen window. Our children were in the kitchen. They yelled out, very frightened, and I heard Vukile give a cry. I called the children to us but Vukile was still lying there, so I picked him up and tied him on my back, covering his head. I saw no blood. He just gave the one cry.
We thought then, what must happen, must happen. We did not know where to go because the streets were filled with men with the white cloths tied round them, and the riot squad was among them.
We must get out this house before the burni
ng, I said to Mamdungwana, else we are going to die.
Where must we go? Mamdungwana asked.
Better outside, I told her. Better dead outside in the street than being burnt to death.
Outside the house, with the children in front of us, a man stormed at us with a kierie and I don’t know what other sharp things in his hands. We’d already seen them chopping down children and one woman cried: They are chopping my child to death! Now we did not know what to do and we put our hands into the air, straight up.
This man said: Well, run away. He was taking pity on us. But we have the children on the back, how can we run away? I and Mamdungwana, we ran for a little way, the location people were all round us and the police were shooting again, when some other migrants came round the house, all wearing the white. They called to the man who’d stopped us first: Come, here are some more.
But he told them: Let them go.
Now I and Mamdungwana and the children started running, but she was so fat, much fatter than I am. We ran to the other side where it was quieter. We ran past a man lying dead there on the ground, and I do not know if he had been beaten to death or shot. We couldn’t stop to look who he was, but Mamdungwana saw he had on a biscuit-coloured suit and her children hadn’t any clothes that colour. At that moment you couldn’t stop to look at a corpse, you couldn’t turn round to see who it was, you just had to run for your life, you and your children with you.
Mamdungwana’s eyes had been going everywhere as she was running because she did not know where her boys were. She thought they had been murdered.
Another woman ran past us, but she was completely mad in the head. She was shouting: They have chopped my two children to death; they threw the youngest one into the fire to burn. She ran into the bush; we could not help her.
I stopped and looked round. The police van came back in between the people. Then the location men used their heads and they put up a white cloth and told them: We can’t fight any longer; our houses are burning and our children are being murdered. We can’t fight against those other men because the police are helping them.
I saw one policeman from the riot squad sitting on the nose of the jeep with a gun in his hand. Then I saw them call the location men together, and also call together the men from the special quarters and tell them: Whoa! Whoa! Stop it now, just stop it!
My heart turned over in me because I thought why don’t the police shoot the special quarters men? They are only shooting our men.
The police told the people to bring all the wounded and the dead out on to the streets so that vans could take them to hospital.
Mamdungwana’s husband found us. His arm was covered·· with blood, somebody had slashed him. He couldn’t drive the little van, a boy drove it. We can’t sleep here, he said, the house is burnt. Everything is finished.
Everything that happened, the fighting around us, had made me so stupid I didn’t even know how to get to Mosie’s house from where we were, and the more they asked the less I knew. So we left Nyanga and tried to go a roundabout way to another section of the township. But at Section 4 black people with the white cloths stopped us and we sat inside the van, everyone had become stone because they had kieries and pangas in their hands.
Where are you going to? they shouted.
We’re going to Section 4.
The boy who was driving understood how things were and said quickly: We come from Cross Roads, the squatters’ camp on the other side of Nyanga.
So then they asked me: Sisi, and where are you from?
I am from the location, and I am going to my brother’s house.
And from where come these people sitting in the van, because there were people in the back of the van who were hurt in the riots.
I kept talking: These people come from Cross Roads as well.
It is true?
I said: Yes.
If I’d said they came from the location those black people would have killed all of us straight away.
Well, that’s all right. Don’t go down this road; there at the bottom they are still fighting. Go round that way, and they pointed.
Now we had to turn back and enter at 102. Mamdungwana wanted to go back and look for her boys, but we said, no, let us first go to Mosie’s house and off-load everybody.
When we got to my brother’s house everybody was out in the street.
The whole of Guguletu is on its feet, said buti Mosie. They want to go and help the people of Nyanga East. They heard that the police are helping the men of the special quarters. Is that so, sisi?
The people of Guguletu, Poppie explains, had taken out their sharp weapons to help their brothers. So now the police had to shoot to keep the people from each other’s throats; they had to stop the people in the streets from going across to Nyanga because it would have been a giant thing if the Guguletu residents had got across.
Mamdungwana’s stuff was off-loaded at my brother’s house and everything was very crowded. We had brought the injured so that buti Mosie could treat them with his first-aid training. When we arrived he was busy treating a man who had been hit with grape-shot by the police.
As we unpacked the van he said to me: Sisi, why is your child so quiet?
I answered: Maybe sleeping. I have seen too much fighting to think of other things; my child is next to me, that is all.
Rhoda unloosened the blanket with which I had tied Vukile to my back; my arms had no strength left.
Rhoda took the baby and lay him down on the table in the living room.
The child of Bonsile is dead, Rhoda said.
There was no blood. If his head had been hit by a stone, maybe through the blanket, the skin would not even tear. There might be a little swelling and the bleeding might be on the inside of the head, travelling inside. The little head lay on the table, the neck limp. A little to the side the head lay, just as he had been put down.
I did not want to believe that the child was dead, but the little head was lying so quietly, the eyes were open, the lips a little parted and as I looked down at him I could see the greyness coming closer to him.
For what, I thought, all this for what?
77
Monday afternoon mama came with her load of things. They had fled into the bush the previous night. They fled from the people of the special quarters. Because the road to Guguletu had been cut, mama and her family slept amongst the bushes Sunday night. Mr Makasi and his wife who lived next to mama did not flee because they thought the war was over; then they got burnt out. Monday morning, at four, in the darkness Makasi’s wife got up from her bed and dressed. She wanted to run outside. They threw a petrol bomb through the window and as she ran outside she was hit on the head by a brick. She had to get thirteen stitches for the wound. That was why mama was glad that they had fled into the bush.
Your youngest boys are alive, mama told Mamdungwana. They hid in a toilet when the police started shooting. Last night they fled and slept with us in the bush.
But the second eldest boy of Mamdungwana was hit in the neck with an axe; he died in hospital.
Buti Plank went out to look for Jakkie but could not find him.
Jakkie has not been killed, buti Plank reassured mama. His friends laughed and told us we must wait, J-man will be back.
And Jakkie came for the funeral of Bonsile’s child.
Jakkie poured earth into the grave. He asked: Was it a stone or a bullet, mama?
It must have been a stone that came through a window; or maybe a stone that came while Poppie was running. It was not meant for the child.
Mama had become frightened of Jakkie.
But it was a stone, mama.
What could she do? She nodded slowly, yes, it was a stone.
78
After New Year Poppie returned to work for Mrs Swanepoel. She was two days late. We had first to bury my grandchild, she said.
The white woman did not say much. Only: I am sorry, Rachel. And then: I brought back a lot of washing from the seaside house. But don’
t try to do everything at once.
Poppie mourned the sickly little boy child who had passed by. She wrote to tell Bonsile and the mother about his death, but felt: They scarcely knew him, it was I and Kindjie who were the closest to him.
Kindjie can go to school now with my little girl, said Rhoda. She has lost two years of schooling with this looking after Vukile, the sooner she starts the better.
Ja, that’s best, said Poppie. School took Kindjie’s mind off Vukile, but Poppie’s heart did not lift.
By the end of January Nomvula was also back at school and this pleased Poppie, as well as the good school reports of Fezi and Thandi. Bonsile had not saved enough money yet, and had to stay at his job for another year. Next year, mama, he wrote to her, then I’m back at school.
The children who had taken part in the riots in Cape Town were allowed to write their exams in March so as to pass on to the next standards. Jakkie did not write his exam. Bonsile did not lose much by having to keep his job, Poppie thought, these Cape Town children who stay away from school doing nothing don’t make much progress either.
Jakkie’s friends who had been locked up during the riots were brought to court. But the court cases were taken to be heard in the Malmesbury courts, because at the Wynberg and Athlone courts the schoolchildren gathered and made demonstrations and so much noise that the judge said: It’s impossible to continue.
Jakkie and his friends hired cars to go to the court to Malmesbury, but there they were chased away.
All these years Mosie had worked for Mr Green, the boss of the wholesale firm, and now Mr Green asked him: Wilson, what now is it with the children, or must I say Comrades? What the hell do they still want?