Lindi was glad. She hadn’t been looking forward to having to make small talk on the journey into the city. She looked up from the palm-sized screen and took in her first view of South Africa since she had left the country as a child. She didn’t so much look at it, as breathe it in.
There was a lightness to the air, a welcome contrast to the stale, regurgitated variety she had been inhaling all night on the plane. It wasn’t like one of those old Graham Greene novels in which the protagonists always seemed to be wading through the thick, treacly, cloying heat of a tropical backwater. This was fresh and rarefied, a product of Johannesburg’s position on the highveld, and it imbued everything Lindi looked at with a clarity so at odds with the leaden state of her mind as she’d walked off the plane an hour earlier. It lifted her spirits. Perhaps her mission was going to be all right after all.
The car park, spread out below her, was crammed with vehicles, their assorted but distinct colours coming together in a vast mosaic. Every now and then, a car inching its way into a bay or gingerly heading for the exit would catch the sun and and reflect it back.
Airport compounds around the world are like a no man’s land separating the culturally neutral and uniformly branded malls of the terminal buildings from the diverse and sometimes chaotic cities they serve. O.R. Tambo International was no different. Ahead of her, on the perimeter of the car park, Lindi could see vast advertising hoardings. The mobile phones or the latest fuel-efficient cars they were peddling were exactly the ones that were being foisted on hapless consumers back in Britain, except that these were peopled with bronzed faces (nothing so offensive as a truly black face). Around her the wait-your-turn commercial discipline imposed inside the terminal was beginning to break down, giving way to an altogether more robust form of commerce. The porters’ liveried uniforms implied a certain decorum but their insistent appeals to carry Lindi’s bag came from desperation sharpened in the harsh training ground of life in one of Johannesburg’s townships.
‘Taxi, you want a taxi? I know a good-good driver,’ said the porter nearest Lindi. ‘He’s my brother, he going to get you home sharp-sharp,’ the man said, before curling his tongue and expelling a shrill whistle aimed towards the car park.
This as-yet-tentative transaction caught the attention of another man in uniform. He was large with a belly straining at a belt that was only barely visible beneath the rest of his bulk. He wore his uniform like a badge of superiority. He ambled towards Lindi. From a few yards away he started shouting in Zulu at the porter, who retreated a little.
‘I’m sorry, madam, but those chaps are tsotsis. They will take all your money,’ he said. ‘The airport authorities recommend you take the licensed cabs from the rank over there and I will organise it all for you personally.’
Despite the many warnings she’d been given about being careful at the airport – the most recent delivered in rather stern language by the BBC’s office manager – Lindi decided she was not going to reward the officious and bloated attendant with what would be his latest victory over the porter, still hovering in the wings. She noticed now that the porter’s trousers were held up by a length of twine and bunched up around the waist. ‘Thank you, but I’m quite capable of looking after myself,’ she said curtly.
‘Don’t mind him, madam.’ It was the porter. ‘He likes to scare tourists. You see how fat he is – that’s because all the taxi drivers give him some per cent. He’s eating pies all day.’ At this all the other porters laughed. The attendant looked back; he knew he was the butt of the joke.
‘Yes, well, I’m not a tourist so don’t think you can play games with me,’ said Lindi. ‘Where is this wonderful brother of yours?’
‘You have to go to him, madam. The airport is not allowing him to pick up here.’ He reached down for Lindi’s bag.
‘Oh, all right, then. Let’s go.’
‘So you coming back after holiday, madam?’
‘Well, I’m coming back but not from holiday. I’ve been away for many years. I was born here.’
‘You are welcome, madam. You are an African. Now you are home again.’
Back in Britain, Lindi had applied her own rigorous, not to say fastidious, benchmark for achieving the right to be called an African. By that measure most of the white South Africans she knew, including her parents, didn’t qualify, despite their habitual use of the sobriquet. It had always struck Lindi as presumptuous and dishonest. It was all very well calling yourself an African when you were safely ensconced in Britain. That was what she had thought. She had always refrained from calling herself either African or an exile. That was for others to judge. As a white person, it seemed to her, you had to earn the right to be called an African. It couldn’t simply be an accident of birth. And yet that was all it had taken for this porter to confer the description on her. For him it was not an award, not a title bestowed on you for services rendered. It was what you were. It was simply a fact. It didn’t come with any value judgement. He wasn’t offering her a compliment. That she would have to earn.
Looking back, Lindi found new sympathy for the mostly white South African community she’d grown up with in London, an uneasy mixture of the disgruntled and disenchanted peppered with a smattering of draft dodgers and genuine activists. Whatever their varied antecedents, being ‘African’ offered a patina of credibility – even to those whose flight to London had been an act of pragmatism rather than political activism.
She began to understand, too, her own father’s resentful exile. What role did he occupy in this melee of migrants? Even as a child, Lindi had sensed his unease, remembered a sort of lassitude. He’d been quite surly in those early years.
She remembered how he had always been too tired to do the things that came naturally to other fathers. They’d go to the park but he would just go through the motions. Lindi – ever attuned to his moods – would try to compensate. She’d contrive to make those prosaic outings far jollier than they could ever or should be. In her early teens she had already accepted this mantle of responsibility, this requirement to be something more than her years warranted. The more listless Harry had been, the more energy Lindi would find. She had tried to keep up with Ralph, trying to match his boundless demands. As she’d grown older, she’d begun to resent her father’s lacklustre, enervating presence.
‘Dad’s so boring,’ was how she’d put it to Helen one day, the closest she ever got to protest. ‘He never wants to do anything.’
Helen couldn’t bear the thought of her children thinking of their father in that way. But her attempts to get Harry to talk about it always ended in a row. It was like a cold undercurrent that ran beneath the surface of what was otherwise a warm relationship of deep affection and occasional passion. Helen would point to the threats and the precariousness of their lives, once Harry’s paper had been banned by the South African government. He, in turn, would say that so many others had found a way to stay and that he had cut and run just as the edifice of apartheid was beginning to shake and shudder.
It had been different for Helen. Having decided not to work while they settled into London life, she found new purpose as she immersed herself in running the house. She would creep out of bed early, sometimes only a couple of hours after Harry had returned from another night-shift on the Daily Telegraph, get showered, dressed and have breakfast ready by the time she had to wake up the children. In short, she tried to do all the chores Maude had once done for them, including, much to the amusement of the other mothers on the school run, pressing the family’s laundry.
‘You iron their knickers!’ they shrieked in unison.
In the collective challenge of motherhood they offered an intimacy that helped Helen to make the transition from who she had been to the person she had to become.
It took her quite some time, years, really, to understand that in this respect she had something that Harry could not find. He had gone from being something of a minor celebrity in the liberal circles they had moved in – he could walk into a café
in the old Hillbrow, Johannesburg’s equivalent to Paris’s Rive Gauche, and be instantly recognised – to just another hack working on other people’s stories. The occasions when Helen had tried to introduce her friends’ partners to Harry had been unsuccessful. He could barely suppress his contempt for what he regarded as the peculiarly English fascination with garden sheds and DIY. ‘If I hear one more person tell me they’re going to be “pottering about” at the weekend I’ll go nuts,’ he used to rail. He’d wanted sharp arguments and soulful camaraderie – instead he got a pint of warm, still beer.
He longed for those rare visits from other South Africans who’d also found themselves marooned in the no man’s land of voluntary exile. Helen, too, looked forward to the sometimes raucous weekends. She’d noticed that even the anticipation of a visit was enough to lift Harry’s spirit. It comforted her that somewhere in all that muddled resentment and emotional lethargy was the man of passion she had married. For weeks after one of those weekends their life seemed blessed, sprinkled by stardust and touched by the bonhomie of friendships forged in more invigorating times.
Lindi and the porter got to the car. The boot was open and he dropped her bag into it. He pushed it shut only for it to bounce open again. He shut it once more, this time with a little more vigour. Again, it gaped open. The driver came round to the back of the car. He saw the look on Lindi’s face.
‘Don’t worry, madam. There is a little trick and this foolish boy does not know how to do it.’ He brought the boot down slowly and deliberately and just before the point of contact with the chassis he gave it a slight sideways shove. It clicked into place. ‘You see,’ he said, with a huge smile.
As she was getting into the car Lindi saw the driver give the porter some money. He, too, was getting his ‘per cent’.
Lindi rummaged through her rucksack and pulled out the piece of paper with the address of the BBC World Service office. She read out the street name and number.
‘Oh, you work for the BBC,’ the driver said.
‘How do you know it’s the BBC?’
‘Every taxi driver knows the BBC,’ he said. ‘And how is Mr Whitaker, these days?’
There was no answer from the back seat. The driver looked in the mirror. ‘You don’t know the famous Mr Whitaker?’ He made it sound like a terrible rebuke.
Then the penny dropped. Lindi realised the driver was talking about Robert Whitaker – Anton’s friend and the éminence grise at the BBC’s Africa section. ‘Oh, you mean that Mr Whitaker.’ She made it sound as if she might have been thinking of someone else.
‘Yes, yes. We like him in Africa because he gives our leaders a tough time. Ah!’ He hummed the signature tune of the programme. ‘Oh, yes, we like it very much. That man is not scared! If you are cheating, he calls you a cheat. If you are lying, he calls you a liar.’
‘Oh, he’s fine, I think,’ Lindi said limply, regretting she didn’t have something more eloquent to match the tribute she’d just heard.
‘And what story have you come to write? Are you going to the international trade fair? I picked up some press people from there last night.’
‘No, I’m not a journalist. I’m just meeting someone at the BBC office. So how are things here?’ she asked. It is a question asked of taxi drivers the world over and many a traveller’s assessment of a country – whether it’s a journalist in search of a lead, a tourist in search of a good time or, as in Lindi’s case, just someone in search of an insight – begins with the answer given by the man behind the wheel.
‘Ah! No, everything is fine, madam.’
‘What about the murder we heard about? It was news even in London.’
‘Oh, you heard about that in London? That is in Mpumalanga Province, madam. It’s far away. You are quite safe here in Johannesburg.’
It occurred to Lindi that all these assurances about safety might actually have the opposite effect on tourists. ‘I know it’s far away but wasn’t the man famous?’
‘You mean the man who was killed?’
‘Yes. His name was Lesedi Motlantshe.’
‘Oh! You are very up on the news, madam. You know our country very well. Yes, that boy he comes from a very rich family here in South Africa.’
To the taxi driver Lesedi was a ‘boy’, a label stuck, like some birthmark, to all those who are famous in childhood. They are never really allowed to grow up but remain preserved, public perception locking them into a youth they are mostly keen to leave behind.
‘Is that why they murdered him – because he was rich?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I think that is so.’ He didn’t sound convinced. Lindi saw his face in the rear-view mirror. She realised she had not looked at the driver properly till then. He was an elderly man. A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles sat heavily on his nose. Coiled springs of grey hair lined his temples. The rest of his head was covered with a tweed flat cap. Years of perspiration had soaked through it, leaving a crooked, tell-tale trail of salt.
‘But why didn’t they take his car?’
‘Ah! Madam, I think you are a secret journalist!.’ The driver laughed. ‘You like to ask questions, too many questions.’
‘Well, it’s not just journalists who like to know the truth. Anyway, he obviously wasn’t killed for his money. I read that nothing was taken.’
‘Well, I think some people are just angry. They see that some people are getting fat while the others are still hungry.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes, but I am not angry, madam. I am thankful to God almighty for what I have. These young men – the ones who are causing all this trouble in Mpumalanga – they think they should be rich also. They want to drive BMWs and what-what but they don’t want to work.’
‘That sounds a bit unfair,’ said Lindi. ‘Maybe there are no jobs,’ she added, recalling the statistics on unemployment in one of the many briefing documents she’d read.
‘That is true, madam, but you can’t be making jobs by killing people. Those Motlantshes – they fought for our freedom. Now they are getting their reward.’
‘But freedom wasn’t about getting rich,’ she blurted out, and instantly wanted to retract the comment. She knew she sounded pompous but the driver’s rebuttal, when it came an instant later, still surprised her.
‘So you only want the white people to be rich,’ he said. Lindi glanced at the mirror long enough to catch the driver staring at her. Gone was the avuncular demeanour. What she saw, instead, were eyes that accused her of being like all the other travellers who’d sat in that very seat, the ones who liked their Africans to be exotic and poor rather than urbane and rich. She’d barely been in South Africa for an hour and she’d already broken the cardinal rule of conflict resolution – stay neutral.
She was also beginning to understand that the old rules about wealth and poverty, honed over centuries of European class war, did not apply so neatly in this country, with its particular history in which the colour of a man’s skin was the great dividing line, the social fissure that defined both public politics and private morality. What was it Anton used to say? ‘Whether you are being fucked by a white man or black man the result is the same – you are still being fucked.’ Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps there was a hierarchy of wealth in which a black person with money ranked higher than a white one. Lindi told herself she would have to put all that aside, bundle it up and lock it away in her mind.
There was an almost palpable awkwardness in the car, as if someone had uttered an obscenity. Both driver and passenger knew they had wandered into difficult territory, like a pair of ramblers who suddenly find themselves off the beaten track. It was the taxi driver who brought them back to more familiar ground.
‘We have made sure the weather is fine for you today, madam,’ he said, finding refuge in that hoary old conversational set-piece. ‘Ah! But it was raining last night.’
He was the kindly old gentleman again.
‘That’s good,’ said Lindi, looking out of the window and n
o longer in the mood for talking. They had left the three-lane highway and were cutting through one of Johannesburg’s eastern suburbs. What she saw was a study in siege architecture. Mostly you couldn’t see any of the houses: they were hidden behind two-metre walls, leaving only the roof tiles visible from the road. The walls were topped with horizontal rows of thin wire stretched taut, between regularly spaced posts, like guitar strings and frets – except the only music you’d hear from these strings was the hum of low-voltage electricity. Virtually every gate had a sign strapped to it showing a fierce-looking dog. South Africa’s record-breaking crime rate was the stuff of legend but Lindi found the lengths to which its citizens went to protect themselves rather depressing. That, and the subtext of the earlier conversation with the driver, left her feeling subdued. The effervescent mood in which she had looked at a southern sky when she walked out of the terminal building had all but deserted her. She put it down to the effects of a broken night in a crowded plane.
By now they had reached the city centre. The sterile and fearful suburbs had given way to brash and busy streets. The cab pulled up at a set of traffic lights, the corner of Commissioner and Rissik Streets. Lindi became aware, despite the creeping gloom that had threatened to bury her just a moment or so earlier, of a flicker of warmth, of amusement, tantalisingly close to the surface, ready to wriggle out into the open and into her consciousness. She worked backwards, reversing her thoughts, till her eyes settled on the circular red light in front of the car. Her parents, even after all these years in Britain, still called them ‘robots’, as they had done growing up in South Africa. As a child it had always conjured up this vision of the traffic lights sprouting arms and legs and striding away from the scene, leaving the drivers to fend for themselves. She was ten years old again, peering out of the back window of ‘Old Faithful’, their ancient Volvo estate, as Mr Robot turned to her, winked with his red eye, and disappeared down the road.
The Burning Land Page 7