The Burning Land

by George Alagiah

  ‘Soil of Africa. He rules out the whole Mozambican thing.’

  ‘That was bloody obvious from the start.’

  ‘Hang on – I’m just taking you through this bit by bit. My contact at the Wits Migration Unit says there’ll be plenty of work for us on xenophobia once all this has died down. The other thing he’s adamant about is that the killing had nothing to do with the Land Collective’s campaign of violence.’

  ‘Who’s this? Your Wits person?’

  ‘No, Kagiso, the guy from Soil of Africa.’

  ‘How would he know? Okay, I’ve got it. His name is Rapabane, right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him.’

  ‘Joint irrigation scheme with neighbouring white farmer, a bosberaad between commercial farmers and smallholders, nice colour photo and all that … Hmm, pretty standard stuff.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘I’m looking at your friend’s website. I wouldn’t rule it out, the Land Collective I mean.’

  ‘Kagiso thinks killing Lesedi Motlantshe is so counter-productive no one in their right mind would even have considered it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Shit happens when you’re in a war.’

  ‘Yeah, but this is not a war.’

  ‘It is for the Land Collective. Look, back in the struggle, we had all those qualms about what was a legitimate target and so on, but every now and then somebody would go off the rails and we’d have a PR disaster. It’s the same now. I doubt if this Land Collective thing is anything like as organised as we were.’

  ‘I think Kagiso reckons it could be the government.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t give me the low-down, but he says Lesedi was a good man and that is why he wanted to talk to the people at Soil of Africa on the day he died. He wanted to make a difference.’

  ‘And that was enough for the Pretoria boys to knock him off? It’s possible – anything is possible. Look, I wouldn’t put it past those bastards but it’s a long shot, no pun intended. I’d keep an open mind. Don’t rule out the Land Collective.’

  ‘I’m not ruling it out but getting to them could be tricky. I asked Kagiso and he thinks it’s impossible.’

  ‘How much do you trust this guy?’

  ‘Kagiso? He’s like family.’

  A snort at the other end of the line. ‘That was twenty years ago. Time passes, things change – people change.’

  He said it. She feared it. Never mind that Anton was at his patronising best: what if he was right? In her mind, Lindi reran meeting Kagiso just a few hours earlier. Perhaps she’d been naive. She cringed with embarrassment at her words – He’s like family. Now the words sounded hollow. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t had those doubts herself.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ she responded tersely.

  ‘Something is not right,’ Anton said. ‘Look, if Kagiso’s the champion of the landless, which is what it says on their website, then he’s got to know more about the Land Collective than he’s letting on. Either that or he’s just another naive charity worker who’s out of his depth. I know which one I think is more likely. If he’s serious about land reform, he’s got to know about the Collective. He’s just not sharing it with you.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Who knows? But I don’t like it.’

  Sharmi Meer had time to kill. She was now what the social workers might call a woman of no fixed abode. Her car wasn’t the only thing she’d abandoned. She’d left her apartment too. She wandered back to Yeoville and to the mechanic’s shop. As she’d hoped – and expected – the car was gone. It was probably replated and repainted by now.

  She wasn’t normally sentimental about possessions and she was surprised by the pang of loss she felt as she stared at the kerbside where she had last seen the Beetle. The last thing she’d done before stepping out of the car was check the odometer: more than 150,000 kilometres. Sharmi remembered the journeys, all those kilometres, especially the one back to Johannesburg with Kagiso a couple of days after they’d first met. It was like looking in the rear-view mirror of her life. It had been a journey with such promise, at least that’s what she’d hoped, a journey that might have changed her life. It had done that, all right, but only for the worse.

  She’d thought she could walk away from the events of that journey and she very nearly had – that was until she’d met Kagiso again. The sense of betrayal had come flooding back. It had been almost palpable. First the memory of it, then the compulsion to get even.

  Now, as Sharmi stood in an outdoor market in Yeoville, absently running her fingers through a rack of embroidered shirts from Ghana, she knew how hooked she was on competing with Kagiso. Their relationship had become increasingly destructive, eating up their time and energy in a clash of wills that served no greater purpose than its own vicious cycle.

  But she was free of it now. She’d found a way to have the last word. That would be her next move.

  She took the phone from her hip pocket. It was the one that was supposed to be used only in an emergency. She looked at the contacts list: just three numbers, no names. She could hear the lecture from Kagiso. Don’t keep the numbers on your phone: commit them to memory. Even if she did call Kagiso, Sharmi couldn’t think what she would say to him. If it had been Two-Boy, that would have been easy. She’d tell him she loved him, yes, loved him like a sister, and she’d ask him not to be lonely and to take care of himself. With François, too, it would be simple: one of those it-was-good-while-it-lasted calls. She realised it wouldn’t bother her one way or another if she never saw him again. But it was different with Kagiso. She knew the call would be about an ending, but she hadn’t yet worked out what kind.

  13

  It was Josiah Motlantshe’s casual announcement that he would be travelling again that galvanised his wife into action.

  There were many things in their lopsided marriage that irked Priscilla Motlantshe, but which she was resigned to tolerate. However, the thought that her husband could so quickly pursue the business deal that had been interrupted by Lesedi’s death seemed shocking, even by his standards.

  In some ways, his many affairs – which he could barely be bothered to conceal these days – were a relief to her. She had long ago ceased to harbour any passion for her husband. She remembered their first time. Her physical response to him, the sheer pleasure of allowing him into her body, had been so deeply entwined with her admiration for his political courage. The years of separation, when he was incarcerated on Robben Island, had made no difference. If anything it had intensified her desire.

  Looking back, she knew all that had begun to wither the day he’d cut his first big business deal. She didn’t begrudge him the money, or the achievement, but she’d seen how the energy and intelligence that had once driven his activism began to feed an appetite for wealth. The apartment in Sandton, with its incumbent (indeed recumbent) mistress was a relatively new development. The fact of it angered her far less than the idea that he thought she was stupid enough not to know about it.

  Over the years, she had found a rationale that allowed her to tolerate his voracious pursuit of money and those who could help him make more of it. There were plenty of people who admired his ascent of the corporate mountain, viewing it as proof that black men were every bit as commercially gifted as the white men who had for so long had the field to themselves. Priscilla didn’t really buy into that particular conceit – at least, not as far as her husband was concerned – but it gave her a kind of cover, a suit of armour she could wear in the days when she used to accompany him to endless rounds of cocktail parties.

  She found the new black elite hard to swallow. It was not their money but the way they made it. There were millions of black families in the emerging middle class, who had worked their way honestly to a suburban home, a new car, a decent school for their children and a holiday abroad. For them the promise of freedom had come good, and Priscilla admired them. It was the others, whose wealth came from political
patronage and racial preferment, she abhorred: it wasn’t what the ‘struggle’ had been about. There they were, those ample women, tottering around on heels designed to carry the weight of some Italian waif. It had always struck her as comical that after years, decades in fact, of ridiculing the white madams and their endless, often futile commitment to physical rearrangement and disguise, those black women should pursue the same hopeless cause with such vigour.

  She could forgive the young ones who had grown up with this exhibition of wealth and knew no better. It was their mothers Priscilla felt sorry for. Women who had once embodied the fecund resilience of African femininity tried to squeeze themselves into a mould that churned out the primped and pampered white women who lunched on salads in their gated communities and thrived on the inherited status of their husbands.

  Priscilla had taken her cue from an elder stateswoman of the struggle, Albertina Sisulu, who stood her ground, resolutely hanging on to the values that had earned her respect in life and reverence in death.

  The men were no better, she thought. Once, they had argued the merits of public ownership versus private provision, railed against a system that placed greater emphasis on the value of a share than on the welfare of an individual. Now they competed on a new plain. Brands replaced ideology. The party cadres who had once exhorted their members to share out the wealth of the country to all who lived in it now shared it out among themselves. The most expensive watch, the newest car, the biggest house – they accumulated it all without the slightest sense of irony. And her own husband, Josiah, was the finest exponent of the new art of self-aggrandisement.

  She could put up with all of that. She had no choice, except the one-way ticket to isolation that a divorce would trigger. Josiah had threatened her with that prospect more than once, pointing out that he had the power to make sure the girls would stay with him. She wasn’t going to give him that chance. And he knew it. So they lived their separate lives, an arrangement founded on a sort of truce that gave Josiah licence to do whatever he wanted outside the home but gave her the right to decide what went on inside it – and that included bringing up the children.

  Any hope Priscilla had had that the death of their beloved Lesedi might, just for a while, draw the family together had evaporated at the end of the funeral ceremony, just a few hours earlier. Josiah had seen her and the two girls into the car and said he would join them later. As the chauffeur eased the car out of Regina Mundi’s gates, Priscilla had watched her husband climb into the back seat of Jake Willemse’s official limousine.

  Priscilla and the girls had made the journey back to their Houghton mansion in silence. Her daughters had disappeared upstairs as soon as they arrived home. A couple of minutes later she’d heard the canned laughter of a TV show, another rerun to which her daughters could mime the script. She’d called one of the house-workers, a distant and destitute relative, and asked her to take two mugs of hot chocolate to the girls. She’d gone into the kitchen and seen that the cook had left a meal for them. When the maid came back downstairs, Priscilla had told the girl to put the food away and take the rest of the evening off.

  It was eight in the evening. Priscilla had just buried her only son – and lost a companion. She was alone.

  She made herself a cup of tea and sat down at the breakfast bar, the polished black granite reflecting a featureless outline of her head and shoulders. She stared at it. There were no distinguishing marks, not even enough to show she was a woman, let alone a mother. Just a shape. An empty, dark shape.

  Lesedi had been a toddler when Josiah was jailed. His release years later was barely noticed, coinciding as it had with the release of such anti-apartheid luminaries as Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada. Priscilla remembered the years when Josiah was behind bars as among the happiest she had known. She never tired of telling people she was ready to wait for him, whether it was one year or a hundred.

  In the absence of the father, mother and son developed an uncommon bond. They were friends. It was a relationship that survived the disruption of Josiah’s return to the family – which Lesedi had found difficult to cope with – and strengthened as the couple’s estrangement became permanent. Lesedi was Priscilla’s link to a past when morals mattered more than money. She might have given up on her husband but she had clung to Lesedi, hoping for the day when he would make his own mark on the world.

  Now Priscilla recalled the conversation she’d had with Lesedi on the day he was killed. In fact, there had been two conversations. During the first, he’d been in ebullient mood, energised by the meeting with farm workers in Mpumalanga. That was when he’d mentioned Kagiso Rapabane. Lesedi had been full of admiration for the man, saying he wished he could do something as useful as that. Apparently he’d promised Kagiso that he would intervene on behalf of the farm workers.

  ‘Dad won’t like it but I’m determined that we do this deal differently. It’s a disgrace what’s happening,’ he’d said, his voice full of fire and indignation.

  She’d listened with a mixture of pride and fear. Pride in his instincts, fear for what would happen when he confronted his father. She’d tried to prepare him for rejection, saying he needed to think carefully before he talked to his father.

  The next call was markedly different. She’d known something was wrong the second she’d heard his voice.

  ‘I’ve just had a row with Willemse,’ he’d said. ‘I couldn’t reach Daddy so I called Willemse and told him that the whole thing stinks. I’m not afraid to lift the lid on this whole business and he knows that.’

  She’d asked him what the minister had said.

  Her son had tried to make light of it. ‘Oh, just a lot of shouting and stuff. He can’t touch me.’

  She’d asked him if the minister had threatened him.

  ‘No, just going on about what was at stake for Daddy and so on. Said I shouldn’t meddle in stuff I didn’t understand.’

  And then Lesedi had uttered the words that had left her cold. ‘But I do understand, Mom. I’ve got all the information – the deals, the bribes. I’ve got it all somewhere safe.’

  Just the memory of those words brought her up sharp, as they had done when she’d first heard them. She’d seen Lesedi for what he was – a boy in a man’s world – and she’d feared for him. She had ended the conversation there and then, saying they should talk more when he got home. He’d told her not to wait up as he had one more meeting with the community worker, Kagiso, before he set off for Johannesburg. It was the last time she’d spoken to her son.

  A few minutes later she’d taken a call from Jake Willemse. His tone had been silken civility, his message anything but. Your son should get himself a proper job, he’d intimated in a barely veiled threat, instead of interfering in government business. ‘He really will get into all sorts of trouble if he carries on like this.’

  He’d stressed the word ‘government’ as if it were sacred ground, a place for the gods, not mere mortals like Lesedi. He’d ended the call by saying he’d have to tell the boy’s father. This was the conversation she’d relayed to Josiah when he’d called from Dubai.

  Priscilla heard a key in the front door and looked across the vast open-plan living room to see the security guard let Josiah in. Even at this distance she could see he’d been drinking. In some men alcohol dispels the gloom and lifts the mood. In Josiah it made him combative and aggressive. He’d never touched her in anger but the threat was always there.

  ‘Vusi! Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Where are these people?’

  ‘I gave them the evening off. I thought we’d want to be on our own.’

  ‘You thought what?’ he barked.

  ‘I said, I thought it would be better if we all had some time to ourselves. Shall I call the girls?’

  ‘No, leave them. Get me a drink,’ he said, as he entered the hallway toilet, leaving the door open.

  Priscilla poured out a large measure of Johnnie Walker Blue Label and walked over to the fridge.

  ‘No, no, leave the
ice.’

  ‘I’m just getting myself some ginger ale,’ she said. She noticed that his fly was still open. There was a drip mark on his trousers. He kicked off his shoes and fell onto the white leather sofa, which gave out a hiss as his full weight sank into it.

  It was then that whatever tiny vestige of a relationship Priscilla still shared with Josiah disappeared. True, they were no longer man and wife in a conjugal sense, but there had been moments, if few and far between, when she might look across a room full of people and see Josiah, vigorous and animated, and remember why she’d once felt as if her life could never be complete without him at her side.

  Now the memory of that feeling had disappeared for good. Priscilla didn’t need to will it away: it simply vanished, expunged from her life story. She felt as if she’d witnessed a death right there, in front of her, at that moment. For she could no longer see the man, just a corpulent and vulgar body.

  ‘I’m going in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘I have to meet those fellows in Dubai. They’re still there. Kariakis persuaded them to stay until I get back.’

  If a man is to be judged by the company he keeps, then Priscilla Motlantshe rued the day her husband had met George Kariakis. He was pre-eminent among a whole new class of middlemen who had emerged to service these new land deals. Suitable land had to be identified, local officials sounded out, wined and dined, and legal obstacles overcome – more often than not with a secret hefty contribution to the bank account of whichever official could change the rules.

  After some poor press in the wake of the first few deals, these consultants – ever quick to spot a new opening – had started offering a public-relations service too. Kariakis’s latest PR offering purported to show what conditions were like for a group of workers in southern Sudan after their farm – formerly state-owned – had been taken over by a private company based in Dubai. The brochure made it look like a holiday camp. The residents had running water in their homes, lunch breaks under canvas awnings in the field, and a community club where they relaxed in the evenings. Children were filmed queuing to see the company doctor for a check-up, and a young European volunteer was shown giving English lessons to a class of eager women. It reminded Motlantshe of the black-and-white films the apartheid government’s Department of Public Information once produced. A whole generation of whites was persuaded that apartheid South Africa’s black population was ‘the happiest on the continent’. Same technique, new audience.