The Burning Land

by George Alagiah

  In the beginning, this new ‘carve-up’ of Africa, as academics and activists alike were calling it, was dominated by that breed of merchants who had always trawled through the continent, sniffing out the prospect of money-making with an unerring nose for a quick deal. Lately, more conventional players – international banks and private-equity firms – had been attracted to the business, drawn in by the oversize profit margins, like a pack of hyenas moving in on a kill. But in a business where personal contact was the key they often seemed flat-footed. And the undisputed ‘land king of Africa’, as the Financial Times had dubbed him, was George Kariakis, a half-Greek, half-Lebanese trader whose family had long-standing, if dubious, links with several African leaders of the old school – the ones who still found it difficult to make a distinction between the national coffers and their own bank accounts, especially the ones they held offshore.

  ‘I’ll go and pack some things for you,’ she said. ‘How long will you be away?’

  He didn’t bother answering. Priscilla walked to the stairs, one heavy step at a time, carrying the dead weight of a failed marriage. Packing her husband’s bag took no time at all. She’d done it often enough. All she had to do was take the ironed and folded clothes from the cupboard and place them in the bag. There was a time when she had chosen his outfits with care, looking at which ties would go with which suits. Now she pulled off the first ties that came to hand and left the suits in the dry cleaner’s cellophane wrapper.

  She walked out into the upstairs hallway and checked the girls’ bedrooms. They were both fast asleep. She envied their escape from a day of howling emotion and eternal loss. From where she was she could hear Josiah snoring, slumped on the sofa. She couldn’t be bothered to wake him and cajole him to bed. Those days were over.

  Priscilla went into Lesedi’s room. Sitting on his bed she pulled his pillow towards her, settled it in her lap, and remembered the boy who would sit there, eyes staring at her in wide-open innocence, as she told him stories about his father and the other freedom-fighters. She lifted the pillow to her face and breathed deep, sucking in what remained of him. She had had such dreams for him. But the mother who had once known every crease and dimple on her child’s body also knew that the innocence that had been so endearing in the boy had been a weakness in the man.

  She blamed herself. She had armed him with idealism, but that alone was not enough to withstand the greed and guile of the world around him. Looking back, she realised that she had tried to make of Lesedi all that she had once hoped his father would be. And she had succeeded. But what good was idealism when it lay beaten and dormant in a corpse? The thought filled her eyes with tears, not the reflexive kind she had shed in public earlier that day at the funeral, but a convulsive outpouring that came from somewhere deep inside her. Priscilla cried for her son, but she cried for herself, too, for she knew that a part of her had died that day.

  She buried her face in the pillow and waited for the pain to dull. And when it did, it was replaced by something else: a mother’s desire to make sure her son had not died in vain.

  14

  The cab driver jammed the car into an impossibly tiny space outside Park station, between the bollard on one side and a VW Kombi on the other. Lindi opened the door, stuck her head through the gap, then corkscrewed the rest of her body out, but in the process snagged her rucksack on the door handle inside.

  ‘Don’t pull, don’t pull,’ shouted the driver. ‘You are going to spoil the car.’ He leaned over from the front seat and freed the strap. It was still too bulky. Lindi reached in and pulled out the two-litre bottle of water from the webbing, then tugged the rucksack free. She hadn’t even started and already she was exhausted. Never a good sleeper, the overnight flight a couple of days earlier and lying awake, rerunning the previous day’s encounter with Kagiso till well after midnight, had left her feeling enervated.

  Meeting Kagiso hadn’t gone anything like she’d planned or hoped. There had been something awkward about it, something unsaid in their conversation. She was still wondering whether it was simply the passage of time, or something else. It was a little after six in the morning. The cup of coffee she’d been promised by the housekeeper at the guesthouse had failed to materialise in time. She was aware of the first signs of a dizzying pang of hunger.

  The combination of Park station and the adjoining Noord Street, a terminus for the city’s minibus taxis, make for one of the busiest transport hubs on the continent. After the croissant-and-cappuccino civility of Greenside, where she’d stayed for the last two nights, this was Africa in all its impressive tumult – even at this time of the day.

  Lindi waited for the driver to get her bag out of the boot. He sat where he was and told her through the half-open window that she should get it herself. It had been a mistake to pay him before she had got out. Lindi lifted the overnight case and put it on the ground. She was about to shut the boot, but instead pulled the case handle up and started walking in the direction that most other people seemed to be going. She didn’t look back, but the sound of the driver cursing gave a satisfying lift to a morning that had already offered its fair share of challenges.

  The earliest vendors were already selling an assortment of street food. There were bloodless and dimpled strips of tripe fizzing on a grill. The man cooking picked a piece off the fire, doused it liberally with piri-piri sauce and blew on it before putting it into his mouth. The sickly-sweet smell of rice and mince, cooked over a hissing gas camping stove nearby, reached Lindi and smothered her appetite. Others were unpacking their wares. In a couple of hours they would be selling everything from fake Rolex watches to shoelaces and polyester corsets.

  Two of them caught Lindi’s eye. Their chatter – loud and ebullient – was in a language she didn’t recognise at first but then realised was a version of French. One had the tell-tale facial tribal markings still evident on some of the more elderly migrants from West Africa. They were playing their part in the great conveyor-belt of trade, unnoticed in the official statistics, which distributes wealth from Africa’s teeming and wealthy cities to its forgotten and poor villages. The meagre profits from a few weeks outside Park station in Johannesburg would, in the wonderful alchemy of pavement commerce, be transmuted into a corrugated-iron roof over a mud hut somewhere in the Bandiagara Hills of Mali.

  Inside the station Lindi and the other early-morning travellers were like fish swimming against the current, quickly swamped by commuters coming the other way, disgorged by one of the arriving trains from Johannesburg’s township hinterland. It made her think of the Hugh Masekela hit ‘Stimela’, a favourite of her father. The Afro-jazz classic, with Masekela’s inimitable sound effects mimicking gushes of high-pressure steam and whistles, evoked the old journey of rural labourers drawn to Johannesburg’s gold reef – and all too often to a life of dissolution in the city’s migrant hostels. More than two decades of majority rule had yet to rid the country entirely of that particular remnant of the old order.

  Lindi realised she was in the wrong place and looked for signs for the long-distance bus terminus. She spotted an elderly porter. His shirt collar hung around his scraggy neck.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said, and started to shuffle back towards where Lindi had come from. He stopped just before the entrance and pointed to one side.

  ‘Just over there, madam. You see the soldiers over there? Go past them.’

  ‘Do the buses to Mpumalanga go from there?’

  ‘Mpumalanga? You’re not going to Cape Town?’

  ‘No, I want to go to Nelspruit.’

  ‘For the Kruger Park?’

  ‘No, no, I just want to go to Nelspruit,’ Lindi said, struggling to disguise her irritation.

  ‘Only these Mozambicans are going that way now. Watch them – they are going to steal your things.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ she said, and walked towards the group of soldiers. The presence of troops in the city centre was highly unusual. They were there to help a police force n
ow stretched to the limit.

  There were about six of them. One of the soldiers eyed her. Lindi realised how incongruous she was in this place. She was white and she was a woman alone. She’d spotted a couple of backpackers earlier, sitting on the ground, slouched against a wall. Batik-trousered, dread-locked hippies, Anton would have called them. British, judging from their accents. The soldiers were moving on, except the one who had been watching her.

  ‘You are going where?’ he said, as she approached.

  ‘To get a coach ticket,’ she said.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To Nelspruit.’

  ‘What business have you there?’

  ‘I’m visiting a friend.’

  ‘You’re from where?’

  ‘London in UK,’ she said, with as much finality as she could muster.

  ‘Okay, thank you.’ He nodded and moved off to join the others.

  There was an entirely different atmosphere in the long-distance coach terminus, Park City Transit Centre. Instead of the purposeful coming and going in the Metrorail station, where people were fleet of foot and travelling light to a day’s work in the big city, here they were burdened with possessions, people taking what they could and heading out of town. It was the difference between those keen to arrive and those desperate to leave.

  Bulawayo, Mutare, Maputo, Harare, Lusaka – the destination boards reminded her of childhood days when she and Ralph would pore over the family atlas and imagine adventures in exotic places.

  There was a long queue in front of 4A, the departure gate for the 8 a.m. coach that went to Nelspruit in Mpumalanga, then on to Komartipoort, the border crossing into Mozambique. She was glad the BBC office manager had advised her to make a reservation. She still had to collect her ticket.

  There was an even longer queue outside the Translux ticket office. It started with a semblance of order in front of the fingermarked glass partition at the counter, then fanned out. There must have been a couple of hundred people, perhaps double that – Lindi couldn’t tell. And more of them were joining by the minute. Somebody’s luggage, a heavy-duty plastic bag, was being passed, like a crowd surfer at a concert, towards the front. She was nearly knocked over as a young man was ejected from the queue by two women. Lindi didn’t have to speak Shangaan to understand that their vocabulary was both colourful and robust. It was now 7.15: she had less than forty-five minutes.

  She was thinking about trying to push through the crowd when she felt an arm reach over her shoulder to shove the man in front of her out of the way. He tripped over the luggage on the floor and fell against some of the others who, in turn, threw him back upright. It was the soldier again.

  ‘Move! Move!’ he shouted at the crowd, and then, ‘Follow me,’ to Lindi.

  There was a moment, just a millisecond, when Lindi thought she ought to protest – but she needed that ticket. People looked on sullenly as the soldier carved his way towards the front of the queue, Lindi in his wake. As he emerged at the very front, the man who was next in line at the counter turned round instinctively to hold his place and pushed back, realising too late who the queue jumper was. The soldier grabbed him by the neck and shouted, ‘Get out, get out of here!’

  ‘I’m sorry, baas. I’m sorry. I just want my ticket. I have waited since three hours.’ The man was pleading.

  ‘You can wait some more. Go to the back.’

  ‘Look, that’s really not necessary,’ said Lindi. ‘I can wait.’

  ‘No, these people have to be taught a lesson. They are causing trouble here in South Africa.’ He turned to the man again and barked, ‘Voetsek. Fuck off, man! Okay, madam, you can get your ticket now.’

  The soldier rejoined the rest of his group. They were pointing at the man, bent and crumpled under the suitcase he was carrying on his shoulder, and laughing. Lindi heard the murmur behind her. She knew what they were thinking: white skin, straight to the front. Same old story.

  At the departure gate, one of the uniformed staff from the coach company called out for those who held reservations. Lindi was the only one. She was escorted through to the bus and given the front seat where there was extra leg-room.

  Outside there was a growing commotion. One of the cases had burst open as the bus conductor had flung it into the hold, spilling the contents back out onto the pavement. He shouted at the owner as she and her two children tried to gather up their possessions. Lindi saw the fracas unfolding from her seat. She was struck by what the woman had chosen to cram into her bag, which was all too publicly on display. Lindi felt as if she was peeping. The bulk of it was children’s clothing, and there were some exercise books. One of them lay open, a child’s deliberate handwriting sitting on each line of the ruled paper, the letters lined up, like starlings on a power cable. There was little that seemed to belong to the mother: a bar of soap, some medicines, a saucepan, several packages of dried pasta, and another with salt.

  Lindi wondered what the woman had decided to leave behind. There was nothing sentimental here, no photos, no frivolity. It was a survival kit. It reminded Lindi of the radio programme back in Britain that asked famous guests to compile a list of the music they would like to have if they were to be stranded on a desert island. Participants were also allowed to take a luxury. On the last edition she’d listened to, the actress had asked for an endless supply of her favourite scented candles so she could while away the balmy evenings in a mist of lavender or some such. In this suitcase, there was no thought of luxury, just the grinding certainty that making it from one day to the next would be hard enough.

  The coach filled quickly. The woman and her two children were the last to get on. The mother had bundled some of her possessions into a cloth. She looked down the bus for spaces. She saw that the one next to Lindi was free but motioned to the children to keep walking. Lindi looked down the aisle. The woman had found the last two seats and had one of the children on her lap. Lindi leaned forward and asked the driver to tell the woman there was a seat free next to her.

  ‘Ah. No, it’s okay, ma’am. They are fine like that.’

  ‘But it’s going to be hours.’

  ‘These people are used to it.’

  Lindi got up and started walking down the aisle.

  ‘One of your children can come and sit next to me,’ she said.

  The mother looked ahead and caught the driver’s disapproving expression. Just a few moments earlier he had abused her for not packing properly and wasting his time.

  ‘I will keep them here, madam,’ she said.

  Lindi felt marooned halfway down the bus. To walk back to her seat on her own would be to hand victory to the driver. She looked at the elder child, the boy sitting next to his mother. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something for you in my bag. You can have some and bring some to your sister.’

  The boy looked up at his mother. She stared at Lindi, a trace of fear in her eyes. There had been so many decisions to make in the last few days, matters of life and death, and now this one, the simplest of them all, seemed beyond her. Lindi held out her hand to the boy. He took it gingerly, as if he might come to some harm. Together they walked back to Lindi’s seat. She sat down by the window, rummaged through her rucksack and found one of the energy bars she always carried on long journeys.

  ‘Now, what’s your name?’

  ‘Paulo Simbini.’

  ‘That’s a lovely name. And how old are you, Paulo?’

  ‘I’m eight years.’

  ‘And what is your sister’s name?’

  ‘She has a South African name because she was born here.’

  ‘And what is her South African name?’

  ‘It’s Britney.’

  What were they thinking of, the parents, when they chose a name with its antecedents in American pop culture? Britney was only the latest in a long line of children saddled with names that owed nothing to their family’s culture but carried the migrant’s hope that what you called a child might somehow ease its journey in a foreign
land. Lindi revisited her old hang-up about her parents’ decision to give her a Zulu name. Perhaps they, too, were like travellers hoping their child would grow up in a new and different country, one that had put racial separation behind it. She unwrapped the snack and broke it in half.

  ‘This half is for you, Paulo. I’ll keep it safe while you take this one to Britney. Okay?’

  Paulo got back just as the coach eased out of the terminus, heading out past Benoni and the eastern suburbs on the N12 highway.

  ‘Do you have a South African name?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I do, it’s Lindi.’

  ‘That’s a nice name.’

  ‘Thank you, Paulo. My real name is Lindiwe but all my friends call me Lindi so I want you to call me Lindi.’

  ‘Are we friends?’

  ‘Well, I hope so. We’ve got quite a few hours together, so we can get to know each other.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘That’s a long story. Do you know where UK is?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘Is it a big country?’

  ‘No, but some very famous people come from there.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Well, let’s see. I bet you like games, I mean like football and athletics.’

  ‘Yes, it’s my favourite on TV.’

  ‘So you’ve heard of Mo Farah?

  ‘You mean the one who runs very far?’

  ‘Yes. He’s from my country. And Manchester United, you’ve heard of them?’

  ‘Wow! Are they from your country too?’