The Burning Land

by George Alagiah

  ‘Oh! How’s that?’

  ‘Well, like they say, your reputation goes before you.’

  Anton raised an eyebrow at Lindi.

  ‘Now would that be in a good way or a bad way? What can I do for you?’

  ‘We heard your interview on Today a few hours ago. I was just … we were just wondering if you’d like to come in and talk to the High Commissioner about your concerns.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t like to come in.’

  ‘It’s just that Lesedi Motlantshe’s death has shocked us all and we, the government, we’re obviously as keen as anybody to find the culprit and you seemed to suggest there was a link with the government’s land-reform programme.’

  ‘Is that what it’s called?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Selling land to foreigners, that’s land reform, is it?’

  ‘Getting back to your interview. We were just wondering whether you had any thoughts on who might be responsible for Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder.’

  ‘I have plenty of thoughts, my friend, but I’ll keep them to myself. As you know, we’re a neutral organisation.’

  ‘You didn’t sound very neutral this morning. Anyhow, if you do have second thoughts, maybe you’ll come to us first.’

  ‘Oh, you know me. I wouldn’t make a move without talking to you all first. Have a good day, Ms …?’

  ‘Semenya.’

  ‘Ms Semenya, that’s right. Thanks for your call.’ Anton slapped the phone back into its cradle. ‘Patronising bitch! That was the High Commission.’

  ‘They must be getting twitchy in Pretoria. The High Commission wouldn’t have made that call off its own bat. And what did she mean come and talk to them first?’

  ‘They’re frightened by the publicity,’ said Anton. ‘I’d say they’re more worried about their precious land-sales programme getting a bad name than worrying about Lesedi. Listen, I’ve got a board meeting, another four hours of listening to the great and good pontificating. Let’s thrash out what we should do. Where were we?’

  ‘Whether I should go or not. The thing is, we never get involved unless we’re invited and both sides want us to intervene. But who’s inviting us in this instance?’

  Normally he would find it hard to argue with her logic, but Anton was in full flow by now.

  ‘The most important rule of all is that we are here to prevent conflict, not wait till it happens and then start picking up the pieces. Let’s leave that shit to the cotton-frocked aid workers.’ Anton stopped himself. If he hadn’t, Lindi would have done it for him. She knew that particular rant inside out. She thought it was mostly unfair and bordering on misogynist. In Anton’s world, the aid workers were never men in jeans.

  ‘Find these people,’ Anton said, ‘the Land Collective, you know, whoever is writing this stuff for them, and you have one side. As for the other – well, it’s the big farmers, it’s the government, the greedy bastards right here in this city, it’s the Arabs, Chinese, it’s the unions – the whole lot of them.’

  ‘I think you’ve just about covered all bases.’

  ‘So you’ll go?’

  Lindi’s mind drifted back to the call she’d received earlier that morning from Missenden and then even further back to the way he’d treated her at the Foreign Office. Just the thought of it was like being humiliated all over again. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d told herself that she’d moved on. She knew now that she hadn’t. It wasn’t so much what Missenden had done but her failure to react, to stand her ground, to call him out that left her feeling, well, less than the woman she wanted to be.

  ‘I’ll go,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll need a couple of days to get ready.’

  ‘Sure? You don’t want to think about it?’

  ‘I have thought about it.’

  5

  In South Africa, the violence started within minutes of the police statement: a Mozambican labourer in Mpumalanga Province had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe. Across the country there were reports of attacks on foreigners. It didn’t matter where they came from: an exotic accent was enough. In barely forty-eight hours, parts of South Africa began to look like a war zone.

  ‘Let them cook,’ the man shouted, as the fire-fighters tried to muscle their way through the crowd that had gathered around the western entrance to Ponte City. Above the screaming heads, a window on the fifth floor of the building belched thick black smoke. Occasionally the wind would clear it, revealing the hungry flames probing for new material to devour. From several other windows, occupants of the building leaned out, pleading for help. But their fear-filled cries were drowned in the noise below, the wailing police sirens, the deep-throated mechanical murmur of the fire-engine pumps and, above it all, the taunts of the crowd flinging their filthy curses like bloodthirsty spectators waiting for the kill in a gladiatorial contest.

  ‘We don’t want foreign rats in South Africa!’ a woman shouted.

  Immediately, as if on cue, those around her took up the chant: ‘The rats must go! The rats must be killed!’

  Much higher, from the crown of Ponte City, there was a curling, twisting stream of smoke. On the ground, a section of the crowd suddenly surged in one direction, no one really knowing what they were looking for but all of them scenting spilled blood. The police had cleared a space around a twisted body on the pavement.

  ‘Fucking Mozambican was trying to run,’ someone said, as if that was explanation enough as to why the man lay lifeless where he’d fallen.

  ‘The place is full of them,’ another said, adding, ‘You can smell them.’

  The fifty-four-storey doughnut-shaped Ponte City, which dominated the Johannesburg skyline, had once been one of the most desirable places to live. Built in the mid-seventies, the tallest residential building on the continent, it stood tall and proud, like a middle-fingered rebuke to those who hoped apartheid’s foundations were crumbling. But for all its architectural precociousness, the Ponte was left isolated in the eighties as the Group Areas Act, which strictly assigned different parts of the city to different races, began to lose its force and the complexion of downtown Johannesburg began to change.

  The adventurous white city-dwellers, who had revelled in their fast-lane lives, found a new enthusiasm for the mundane charms of the suburbs. As the white tide retreated, it was replaced by a swirling torrent of black people, many of them from outside the country’s border. Africa, in all its spectacular colour and chaos, lashed the Ponte building, like a wave crashing into a cliff. It didn’t stand a chance.

  By the mid-nineties the Ponte echoed to the sound of a dozen languages, a Babel-esque din which foretold the worst fears of white South Africans, who worried that they would be left marooned in their final redoubt, unable to understand the world around them and misunderstood by it. With white flight went the businesses and their taxes; with the taxes went many of the public services that had once made Ponte the gold standard of urban living.

  Ponte’s new immigrant colony, from Nigerian traders and Congolese pastors to Mozambican labourers and Somali shopkeepers, lived in the Catch-22 of the black economy, where they were in the city but not of it. If they tried to pay their bills, their dubious immigration status would be exposed. If they tried to sort out their residence permits they would be thrown out. So the plaster peeled off the walls, and the plumbing sprang leaks and the rubbish piled up. The building itself, with its great cylindrical cavern, became a dumping ground, the detritus rising in layers, like geological accretions, until it stood several storeys high.

  More recent attempts to rehabilitate the building had met with varying degrees of success. Flats in the uppermost floors were renovated and a few adventurous types had moved in, like an expedition force sent into the unknown. But for the most part, Ponte City remained what it had been for twenty-odd years – a home from home for those for whom the African dream was still just that: a work in progress.

  Now even that meagre hope was
threatened, engulfed in the indiscriminate flames of xenophobia.

  6

  Outside Nelspruit, in Mpumalanga Province, the few people left in the squatter camp, the ‘informal settlement’, as the bureaucrats call it, stare at the man. He’s an outsider. That much is obvious: his clothes are too clean; they fit him like he actually bought them, not like the rags they are standing in. They only have to look at him to know he’s a South African, not like them, migrants. They are the marginal people, the cleaners and labourers, the servants and night-shift workers who creep around the shadowlands of every nation on earth.

  What does he want? He greets them, or tries to. They just turn away, suspicious. He wants to ask them how it happened, this devastation. Did they recognise anyone, perhaps those who led the thugs? Did the police come? No answers. Just the silent accusation that whoever he is, whatever he wants, it is too late. He wants to tell them it was not his fault.

  Shack after shack, reduced to a pile of smoking embers and buckled corrugated-metal sheeting. Here and there he sees the remnants of the small, meagre lives of these people, so essential to the rural economy but unrecognised by it: a stack of enamel bowls ready for an evening meal that was never eaten; a cracked mirror in which someone, against all the odds, had tried to show a presentable face to a world that couldn’t have cared less; a portrait of the late Samora Machel, Mozambique’s charismatic revolutionary leader, still pinned to the plywood partition that lies on the ground. He knows about Samora Machel, his struggle against Portuguese colonialism in the sixties and the subsequent, even more vicious, battle with the apartheid regime in South Africa, which had been grafted onto the history syllabus when he was in secondary school.

  Staring at the faded poster of the smiling leader in his heyday, he’s weighed down by a profound and almost debilitating sense of disappointment. Machel’s victory, winning back the right of an African people to call the land their own, seems so empty now. South Africa should have been next. But here he was, still caught in a fight over land. There was a betrayal at the heart of this latest struggle in South Africa that eclipsed anything its Portuguese colonisers had done in Mozambique. When the Portuguese took the land, when they exploited its natural largesse, they had done so as conquerors: they hadn’t pretended otherwise. The whole point of the exercise was to enrich people many thousands of miles away, not those whose sweat seeped into the ground as they toiled under an African sun. But in this new battle in South Africa, it was men who had won the land in the name of freedom who were enriching themselves at the expense of those who’d been so naive as to think the great struggle had been about them.

  Now he’s back in town. He sits at a table, alone and in the dark. A single light bulb hangs uselessly in the centre of the room and the curtains are drawn tight. His mahogany skin is rendered pallid and gaunt by the blue wash of a computer screen. His tired eyes stare through spectacles that mirror the screen. Long, elegant fingers, normally so deft and expressive, lie beside the keyboard, motionless. He wants to write but can’t think where to start. The thoughts are there; the words are elusive. He, too, has seen the video that Lindi and Anton witnessed.

  It was never meant to be like this. Sabotage, yes. Propaganda, yes. All of that and more – but not this. Not murder. This hideous mob violence was never part of the plan. In Johannesburg, the iconic Ponte City is on fire; here in Mpumalanga Province the homes of Mozambican migrant workers have been ransacked; and even in far away Western Cape a sixteen-year-old Somali girl is gang-raped and left bleeding by a drainage canal on the edge of the Khayelitsha squatter camp. Where did all this anger come from?

  In his mind, he turns over every word he’s ever written since they – the Land Collective – started their clandestine campaign against land sales. Which phrase, which sentence, which exhortation could anyone have construed as licence to murder? He realises he’d never really thought about who was reading his statements or understood how they might be transmuted in the reading. He deals in ideals; it had never occurred to him that others might trade in vengeance. He imagines how, like a game of digital Chinese whispers, his messages might have been forwarded from reader to reader, each one adding their own meaning to those words he’d thought he’d composed with such care and purpose. He was never in control. He knows that now.

  He keys in a series of passwords, following an encrypted path till he reaches his destination. His last entry is there. It was written late on the day of Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder. He rereads it.

  Lesedi Motlantshe was a SON OF AFRICA, a child raised on the milk of freedom. He did not deserve to die. Our campaign is to PROTECT THE LAND, NOT KILL ITS PEOPLE. It was not Lesedi who wanted to sell the land to FOREIGNERS. It is the SYSTEM. The deals are being signed by big men sitting in Johannesburg, London, Dubai – not here in our BELOVED MPUMALANGA. Lesedi was born rich but that is not a crime. His life was the life many of our people have dreamed of. Whoever has killed him has not advanced our cause. This HEINOUS ACT will alienate us from many people who looked at Lesedi like their own child. WE ARE NOT THUGS, we are not tsotsis, we are ACTIVISTS. Those who have done this thing must go to the police. We must not let our cause be derailed. We must not let the blood of this innocent man stain our HISTORIC MISSION.

  It’s a little after two in the morning. In a few hours’ time he would have to set off for work. To his other life.

  He isn’t sure if he’d fallen asleep. His laptop is in screensaver mode, a logo bouncing off the edges, like some infinite game of snooker. Could he, could they, the Land Collective, change the direction of this violence? He looks around the room. A hint of dawn light is just discernible through the curtains. He taps the keyboard and is back where he was, a blank screen waiting for the words that might reach those who have unleashed this wave of chaos.

  His boots, discarded by the doorway to the room, are still covered with ash from the squatter camp. He starts to type.

  I have just returned from HILL VIEW. My boots are covered in ash, my clothes are smelling of smoke from the fires that have left thousands of our FELLOW AFRICANS homeless tonight. Our BROTHERS and SISTERS from Mozambique have paid a high price for this FOOLISHNESS. This chaos is just what the LANDOWNERS AND THEIR MINISTER FRIENDS want. They want us to fight among ourselves. They want us to believe that the problem is the Mozambicans. But they are POORER than we are. They are the POOREST OF THE POOR. That is why they come here, working for NOTHING. They are POWERLESS. They are our comrades in this NEW STRUGGLE for our land. The police ARRESTED A MOZAMBICAN BROTHER but they had NO PROOF that he was involved in the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe. They want people to think this is a struggle between South Africans and Mozambicans. But it is not. This is a struggle between those who WORK THE LAND and those who want to sell it to POLITICIANS AND THEIR RICH FRIENDS OVERSEAS. It is OUR LAND, it belongs to ALL South Africans. This violence must STOP NOW.

  7

  The photograph, in its simple black frame, had hung on the wall outside her parents’ study for as long as Lindi Seaton could remember. She must have walked past it a million times. In the mornings, the sun glinted off the glass, obscuring the picture and reflecting a shard of light across the narrow hallway. It was only in the afternoon, as the sun moved over the house, that you could actually see the figures in the photograph – they emerged from the glare one by one, a slow and gentle revelation of their collective history, a curtain parting before a new act in a play.

  This wasn’t just another of the many family portraits that jostled for attention: it was a picture that said something about the Seatons. It took pride of place among all the other framed photographs that had been bumped and knocked so often that the wall looked like a particularly careless example of crazy paving. This one photograph – taken in South Africa in the mid-eighties – was a kind of visual shorthand. It said, ‘This is who we are.’

  On the left of the photo was Harry Seaton, his hair thick, curly and dark. He had one arm around a plump black woman – her apron spoke of her status
in the household, but Harry’s protective arm evoked her special place in the family’s affection. On the other side of the woman was Helen Seaton, her head tilted towards the black woman in another, understated, sign of closeness. In front of them stood three children – two white, one black. Lindi was there, slightly to one side and looking across at her older brother, Ralph. He had his arm around a boy who, in turn, held Ralph’s waist. Harry, Maude, Helen, Lindi, Ralph and Kagiso, Maude’s only son. A portrait of togetherness in a divided nation.

  Many years and thousands of miles away, that photograph of the Seatons and their house-worker, Maude, would grow in significance. It would come to occupy an almost totemic position in their recollection of a time when their credentials as opponents of apartheid were understood and taken for granted. After all, hadn’t Harry written the leader columns that had so irritated the apartheid government? And there was Helen’s voluntary work at the Legal Resource Centre that saw a stream of black petitioners queue up every day, clutching bits of paper that could change their lives. So how natural and effortless it was that Maude should be treated as one of the family.

  But that was then; this was now. You couldn’t relive all that in a North London terrace.

  Slowly, and unwittingly, they were drawn into an allegiance to their new life in London. In this they were led by Lindi and Ralph. Helen and Harry were the parents of the new kids in the local school. As the children made friends so Helen and Harry found they were pulled into a new social circle – a group of people brought together not by choice or conviction but by the arbitrary drawing of a line on a street map: they were all in the same school catchment area.

  For the Seatons, who they had once been became less important than who they were now. The other mothers at the school had been quick to notice how confidently Helen wore her collection of bold ethnic jewellery and asked her where she’d got it – but that was the limit of their curiosity. There were no Brownie points for having once tried to chip away at the edifice of apartheid. It was Helen who felt this need for a separation from their former life most keenly. Once or twice, over a hurried cappuccino at Ribbons & Taylor on Stoke Newington Church Street, she’d noticed how a reference to her campaigning days in South Africa had been ignored, like a conversational cul-de-sac. The heartfelt conviction that had propelled her actions in Johannesburg didn’t translate well in the tired aftermath of a hectic school run. Here, in the frazzled mess of soggy anoraks and young children, her past accomplishments seemed neither relevant nor interesting.