Lindi gathered her work things, looked out of the window, decided she would not need her waterproofs, and manoeuvred her bike through the front door of her ground-floor flat.
4
Lindi arrived at South Trust’s King’s Cross offices, a converted Victorian warehouse now hosting architects, tech start-ups and a firm of human-rights lawyers. No sign of Anton Chetty. On this day, of all days, you’d have thought he’d manage to get into the office on time. She knew where to find him, but she also knew that to search him out would be more trouble than it was worth, a cue for one of his now familiar rants about not needing a nanny.
True to form, Anton was in his usual spot at the café down the road. He always claimed his best work was done there, in the coffee house, at the table in the front corner by the full-length window.
Now living in London, Anton still took more than a passing interest in South Africa. He’d been born there, grown up there, and had even been jailed there. For him, the personal had always overlapped with the professional. He was the charismatic, if shambolic, director of South Trust, which was generally regarded as the most effective outfit involved in conflict resolution outside the United Nations. Most of its work was in poor countries, almost all of which were in the southern hemisphere. ‘Local solutions for local problems’ – that was its tag line. Independently funded and staffed by men and women whose hands-on, real-time decision-making was the antithesis of the committee-ridden structures of conventional diplomacy, South Trust had negotiated deals in places where others feared to tread. It had no official or statutory powers but plenty of influence.
Anton had been up half the night – at least, that was what it felt like. Once he’d heard the news about Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder, he’d been on the phone to old contacts in South Africa. None of them had any answers to his enquiries about Lesedi’s murder and, like Lindi, warned him against rushing to conclusions by linking the killing to land sales. But Anton had eventually slumped into a fitful sleep, convinced he was onto something. When a journalist called first thing in the morning, he found himself giving voice to his suspicions. It was the clip Clive Missenden had heard, prompting his early-morning call to Lindi.
Now nursing a hangover and gulping his second espresso, Anton was determined to find something, anything that might give credence to his overnight hunch. He scrolled through numerous news sites, followed threads on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. A campaigner at heart, he wanted his news unadulterated and he made sure he was plugged into what activists on the ground were saying – in this case in South Africa. He gave short shrift to the speeches given by the apparatchiks in the ruling party, the silver-tongued revolutionaries in their Canali suits, with a penchant for the finer things in life. He knew some, and if he didn’t know them personally, he knew their type. And he largely ignored the international newspapers and their websites. ‘What the hell do those parachute journalists know about anything?’ he would say to whoever would listen.
As far as Anton Chetty was concerned, from whichever quarter the editorial judgements came, they had a common refrain: ‘Here we go again,’ they implied, as if the prospect of yet another African country throwing it all away was as inevitable as the summer rains over Johannesburg. If there was one thing he despised it was the way Western journalists expected so little from Africa, and the self-satisfaction that seeped from their journalism when they thought they had been proved right in their prejudice.
In the years that he’d been in charge, Anton had steered the Trust away from getting involved in South Africa, despite his strong personal interest in his erstwhile homeland. He knew too many of the people who now ran the country and, perhaps more to the point, they knew him. He came with baggage; excess baggage, they would say. When old comrades, now ministers and advisers in government, came to London they would give Anton a wide berth. They had become masters of pragmatism, and found it irritating that he was still talking about ideals. He was rarely, if ever, invited to functions at the Trafalgar Square High Commission. The feeling, it had to be said, was mutual.
But the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe changed everything. No more squeamishness about being accused of interfering in South Africa. To Anton’s febrile mind, Lesedi’s death was not an isolated and untimely killing but the latest and most chilling act of violence among the many he’d been monitoring in Mpumalanga Province.
For some months now there’d been a number of apparently inexplicable and largely unreported attacks on farms in the province. Until now, no one had been killed and nothing was ever taken. Hardly the stuff of headlines. But time and again farm property or equipment would be damaged. On one farm the tractors’ tyres had been slashed. Somewhere else an experimental crop of mielies was hacked down. In another place an intruder had disabled the computerised timer on an irrigation system. Elsewhere a dam had been blown up.
All the incidents had been chronicled in a blog, under the name of the Land Collective. Anton couldn’t remember when he’d first come across the site, but once he had, it had become compelling reading. Every instalment drew attention to the fact that the farm in question had been sold or was about to be sold. Far from being random acts of vandalism, the incidents were brought together in a single narrative. Yet, as far as Anton could make out, the authorities chose to treat each one separately: to acknowledge a link – even behind closed doors – would be to accept that the post-apartheid consensus was breaking up and the political hegemony of the ruling party was being eroded.
Much to Anton’s private satisfaction, the Land Collective had been highlighting something that had long been on his own mind. Anton had always believed that land ownership would become an issue in South Africa, just as it had been in other countries where colonial settlers had carved up the best land and parcelled it up among themselves. Each nation had dealt with it differently. In Kenya white mischief was met with black rebellion; in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, Soviet-backed revolutionary movements had nationalised the land at a single stroke of a Communist pen; and in Zimbabwe a desperate Robert Mugabe had let loose his thugs in a populist move to shore up his faltering hold on power. Anton wasn’t sure how it would pan out in South Africa, but he believed there would be a day of reckoning before long.
He went back to the website, picking through previous statements about various incidents on farms, hoping to find a clue as to why Lesedi had been murdered. Nothing. Not even a hint that revolutionary inflation might account for sabotage turning into assassination.
He couldn’t help feeling that these incidents in South Africa were symptoms of the unfinished business he’d talked about so often. It was the price that had to be paid for the way in which the ‘real’ struggle in South Africa – as he put it – had been tamed and repackaged so that race rather than wealth had become the defining characteristic.
That, to Anton, was apartheid’s big lie: that the great divide was all about race. The painstaking demarcation of areas between whites and others: nie-blankes, vir debruik deur blankes. The classification of people according to skin colour: natives, Indians, Coloureds, whites. Anton was dark-skinned, darker than many so-called blacks, a genetic trace of the Tamil blood that ran strong in his veins but which he barely acknowledged. One of the lasting legacies of the apartheid system was the way in which its brutally simple racial categories superseded more subtle cultural and ethnic differences. So, in the old days, when he was growing up in Durban on South Africa’s east coast, he was simply ‘Indian’. Whether he was Tamil or not was irrelevant. The point was to distinguish whites from non-whites, nothing more.
For Anton, replacing white leaders with black was merely a stepping stone to the real prize – the communal ownership of wealth-making. There were rare, unguarded moments, usually on a bellyful of whisky, when he would tell his colleagues: ‘Whether you are being fucked by a black bastard or a white bastard is irrelevant – you are still being fucked!’ In his book, a black capitalist was barely an improvement on a white one.
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Of all the adjustments he’d had to make since he was released from jail into European exile, the most difficult had been the need to leave his particular brand of politics behind. He remembered how all those matronly Scandinavian women and their earnest, sandal-wearing partners had been shocked to hear that he didn’t just want to change the colour of government but the entire edifice on which it was built. In the early days, when he was still something of a celebrity on the ‘struggle’ lecture circuit, he’d noticed the collective unease in the audience whenever he started talking about changing the whole system, lock, stock and barrel (one of his favoured rhetorical phrases).
It was the same whether he was talking to the politics department at some university in Sweden or to genteel activists in a cathedral city in middle England. In their polite, ever-so-respectful way his hosts in the anti-apartheid movement would suggest, never demand, that he talk about his experiences in prison or how, as a child, a Catholic priest had instilled a sense of social justice in him. At the time, the thing that annoyed him even more than their liking for these insipid tales of victimhood was the way they were always so terribly reasonable. Why couldn’t they just confront him, actually look him in the eye and say: ‘Shut the fuck up about the revolution. You’re here to make people feel good about themselves, not make them feel guilty for being part of the system you hate so much!’
He dragged his eyes away from the rain-spotted window, wondering how long he’d been lost in reverie. He found a recent and detailed account from the Land Collective about a strike by workers at an orange farm in Mpumalanga Province. It described how the trouble had flared up after a whole crop had had to be discarded because the pesticide had been contaminated with petrol. The farm owner, one Piet Meyer, had immediately blamed the workers and sacked the elderly foreman. The old man’s protests – that he had had nothing to do with what had happened – had fallen on deaf ears. Meyer’s attitude – as reflexive as swatting one of the ticks that would land on his leathery, sun-freckled skin – was a throwback to the old era. Anton read the first paragraph:
SACK FIRST and ask questions later – NOTHING has changed. So now the union bosses have been called in. What a joke. They are part of the SYSTEM. They will take six months to write a report and then they will negotiate in a FIVE-STAR hotel and the PEOPLE will be FORGOTTEN. The only thing the farmer is interested in is the FAT PROFIT he is going to make when he SELLS THE LAND. Yes, he wants to SELL his farm to whoever will give him most money. FOREIGNERS want the land but Meyer does not care – he just wants MILLIONS of rands. Nobody asks what will happen to the WORKERS. What are YOU going to do about this? Are you going to leave this INJUSTICE to stand?
It was only ten thirty in the morning and Anton already felt tired and exasperated. He peeled off his rimless glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, and tugged at his goatee. He heard the hiss of the espresso machine and looked over to the counter where Saleh, the Turkish café owner, was taking a breather before preparing for the midday rush.
‘Get me another double-shot coffee, man,’ he shouted.
‘You look like shit,’ came the reply. ‘Whatever you were up to, I hope it was fun. You should eat something. Let me fix you a couple of eggs.’
Anton felt his stomach churn. ‘Listen, I don’t need a fucking mother, I need a coffee.’
A couple of minutes later Saleh arrived with the coffee and placed a large tumbler of fresh orange juice next to it. They smiled at each other. Anton looked at the juice the way he used to look at cough medicine when he was a kid and downed it in one long gulp. Then he turned to the screen again.
He found nothing in the international press about the incident at the orange farm. In his experience rural affairs only twitched the interest of foreign correspondents if the fortunes of white farmers were at stake. They rarely, if ever, departed from this central theme. The plight of an ageing black foreman didn’t register on the Richter scale of news judgements. So when it came to land and how it was distributed there was always the story of the lone white farmer to fall back on – the one who heroically stands up to thugs but, in the end, abandons the fight and joins the growing numbers heading for the departure gate and a life of bilious exile overseas.
There had been plenty of crime on South Africa’s vast commercial farms in the years since democracy. The farmers who owned them, still almost exclusively white, had had the misfortune to be both isolated and relatively rich, certainly in comparison to the poverty all around them. They were sitting ducks. Hundreds had been killed. The murders were the collateral of botched robberies by gangs of increasingly frustrated youths for whom the great promise of freedom had been as beguiling as a strip-tease but, ultimately, just as unsatisfying.
There was a mention on the website of a provincial farming magazine in South Africa. In this version, the incident at Meyer’s farm had been reduced to nothing more than an advice column on the need to supervise farm labourers. There was an interview with a representative from De Kok and Sons, suppliers of farming equipment, fertilisers and pesticides. The spokeswoman said the company had decided – in the light of events at the Meyer farm – to have another look at the instructions that went with their products. They were thinking of making them simpler, perhaps using cartoon characters and pictures to illustrate what needed to be done.
‘We know some of the employees find it difficult to read,’ she was quoted as saying.
He still had the Land Collective website open and clicked back to it. What a contrast! There were the names of the foreman and some of the farm labourers. It even named the brand of pesticide and how the petrol might have been mixed with it. It was like an online training session on how to replicate the sabotage.
News of the event at the Meyer farm would have spread from farmstead to farmstead quicker than a dose of foot and mouth. And yet the magazine had chosen not to report any of the detail. Anton Chetty thought he had the answer. They were frightened of contagion – not of the agrarian kind but the political variety.
It was enough to get his blood up. God! This was like the old days. A cause to get stuck into. He flipped the cover back over his tablet, chucked it into his rucksack and headed for the door.
‘Hey! I’m running a business here – what about some money?’ shouted Saleh.
Too late. Anton was already out of the door. He darted across York Way, all traces of the hangover now miraculously gone.
He plunged into his office building, which overlooked the Eurostar railway line to Paris.
Wayne, whose job description as the building’s janitor was entirely at odds with his preferred occupation of reading the Sun newspaper while slumped on his seat, barely looked up when Anton shouted, as he did every day, ‘Stop reading that fucking rag,’ while bounding up the stairs – the closest he ever got to a daily exercise routine.
‘Nice of you to make an appearance, Mr Chetty,’ Lindi called, as he rushed past her desk.
‘Stop being an old bag and come into my office. And bring me some bloody coffee.’
He peeled off several layers of clothing. More than two decades abroad, first in Stockholm and latterly in London, had failed to make a dent in his sartorial tastes. He still wore a selection of safari suits – the only allowance he made for the inclement weather was to wear a woolly jumper under the jacket. It made him look bulkier than he was – comically so, given his spindly legs. He was short, no more than five foot six or seven but, unlike many men of his stature, he was entirely relaxed about it. ‘Sit down, you bugger. My head is going to fall off if I have to look up at you any longer,’ was a refrain directed at ministers and minions alike.
He hunted for the TV remote control, looking under last week’s newspapers, on the floor beside the sofa until, eventually, he found it perched on the edge of the bookshelf. He pressed the power button and heard the little click before the flat screen on the wall burst into life. For a moment, he imagined it was a detonator setting off a bomb. Yet more fantasies from the glory days. His ‘cell
’ in Durban, a group of college friends, really, had had rudimentary training in bomb-making, taking instruction from a pamphlet smuggled to them by the ANC’s military wing. He remembered going through the step-by-step instructions, using rice packed in women’s tights as a substitute for explosive. How they’d dreamed of striking a blow for freedom, obliterating some iconic building or statue. Like so much else in his earlier life, it had never quite happened that way.
He looked through the door into the rest of the office. How long can it take to make a couple of mugs of coffee?
Lindi finally walked in, two mugs precariously held in one hand and her notebook in the other. He grabbed one of the mugs, took a sip and nearly gagged. ‘Christ! What the hell is this?!’
They swapped mugs, Lindi taking back the peppermint tea that was her habitual work-time tipple.
He knew he was heading for a ticking off and waited for Lindi to speak first.
‘You should have told me last night that you were going to do an interview.’
‘I didn’t know I was. Some journalist caught me off guard first thing this morning.’ Anton sounded almost apologetic, unusually for him.
She brushed off his explanation with a wave of her hand. ‘Whatever. The fact is we’re out there now saying that one of South Africa’s most famous families, not to say most respected, is somehow embroiled in the land business. Talk about going out on a limb.’
The Burning Land Page 3