by Zeilig, Leo;
Only after he had showered, changed and washed out the dirt would he think about what had happened in Bulawayo. He longed for Anne-Marie, to be held, but she was at another of her conferences. The flat felt too large without her presence and he left quickly.
He crossed Herbert Chitepo Avenue and turned into Mazowe Street, the small road that headed north to the university and the suburbs, where the rich had lived with their swimming pools and gravel driveways, houses now occupied by expatriates with their generators and boreholes, their private enclaves free of society’s crisis.
There was a crowd of people standing on the street corner, hailing lifts; Viktor weaved in and out of the stationary bodies. He would visit Louis.
‘How was it, friend?’ Louis leapt up from the counter, throwing down his paper and embracing Viktor. Viktor gripped Louis’s shoulder.
‘We’ve missed you. Haven’t we, boys?’ Louis shouted, looking up to his staff, his boys, ordering them to agree.
Viktor confessed, sitting at the counter, drinking Louis’s free coffee. He told him what happened in a series of short, sensational sentences. He won, at least, Louis’s silence when he was finished.
Louis let out only a solitary ‘Fuck.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, what the fuck are you doing here? You got almost fucked and you fucked your stupid friends. What do you want to achieve? They don’t need you. You can’t help them.’ Louis was disappointed, disagreeable; he had his faults, he knew, but he was not, he believed, incompetent. When Louis worried for other men, it made him angry.
Viktor turned towards his coffee, stared at it, lifted the teaspoon and started to rub the metal with his thumb and forefinger until it was warm and clammy in his grip.
‘I mean, what the fuck did you think you were going to do? You are white. Their struggles are not yours, this is not your place, and you don’t understand. They will kill you.’ He got up and through his clenched teeth emitted another single, taut ‘Fuck.’
Louis lifted two rough sacks of coffee beans stamped Kappas Beans. The loosely stuffed bags fell heavily on both sides of his shoulders. He grunted and pushed his way through the open kitchen to the back door of the café.
Viktor put down the spoon and lifted a hand to his face. Regret and shame. Shame for leaving Bulawayo, regret for having gone. Everything he had done, each time he had engaged his will, he had brought destruction. In that second he could feel all of his comrades in his body so it hurt him and his breath drained suddenly: Tendai, Biko, Nelson, Moreblessing, even the soft imprint of Rosa’s head nestling into his chest, his woman-child who wanted to feel close to him, smell her father’s scent before they would be parted for another week, another year. Viktor rubbed his forehead, shielded his eyes from Louis’s staff.
Everything is broken, he thought, a trail of loss and heartbreak. What an expert at leaving and destruction I am. Having your heart broken is a well-documented pain, but it is nothing compared to breaking hearts – of all sizes, white, black, the hearts of children, his parents, his lovers, his comrades. Daddy, she called me, Viktor thought, and I broke her heart for it. I punished her for loving me. He heard the kitchen door swing open and kept a hand on the empty coffee cup, the other supporting his head.
Viktor thought back to the train journey, how he had bought all the tickets for his compartment so he could be alone. Each bunk was his, four in total, all for the impossible, long trundle north. Two women both in their sixties had slid the door open and asked him if there was room, cheap canvas bags holding their blankets and clothes. They had smiled at him and called him sir. ‘No, they’re taken,’ Viktor had said, indicating his clothes and bag carefully draped over the carriage. Surely Louis could see he was already a real white man and that he did belong here. The women nodded their heads in silence, slid the door closed again and dragged their bags along the corridor. Viktor tried to pin his eyes closed with his first finger and thumb, to dam his tears by force.
Louis came up to him and pushed a plate of fried eggs and bacon and another coffee under his face.
‘We’re all fucked, Vik. Eat this and stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
*
In the corner of the cell was a moulded concrete bed next to a toilet. The walls were chipped; prisoners had scratched their names, dates, in English, Shona and Ndebele. Biko shared the small, narrow rectangle with two other men – Samuel Mutambara and Hopewell Guseni. Samuel had assaulted a policeman who had cleared his pavement stall in the city, stabbing him on the street. Hopewell had been in a drunken fight that he no longer clearly remembered.
Blankets were thrown into the cell with each new prisoner. They shared the single, sunken foam mattress, slept together on their sides, one coarse blanket spread under them, the other two covering them. The deep-set cell window that could be reached from the fixed bed caught the northern wind that even in the early spring worked up the blankets and ricocheted in the cell. With the wind thrashing through the room, Biko imagined that the seven-foot concrete room had been cast out to sea, the three men perched in a strange embrace on their bed raft bobbing on the waves. Biko liked to think that they were riding the surf away from Zimbabwe and the prison, on the warm Indian Ocean, a current carrying them along the whole undivided African coast.
When the morning came, their intimate, necessary night-time embrace came apart. The arguments started, the enforced discipline planned like a war, the minutes – so they imagined, unable to record time – to each task, the turn on the cell toilet, each shitting according to the order of bowel movements, the blankets folded, the songs, the same time each late morning, some political, mostly not, and the post-sadza lecture. Biko was always charming, bullying his recalcitrant cellmates by force of character, as if he’d been planning for the arrest, the prison, survival in this locked room, all his life.
Biko sat on the toilet, resting on the seatless bowl as his buttocks relaxed, the cheeks pulled wide over the rim. The shit would splutter out, always loose, painful, six weeks later still speckled with blood.
‘Those bastards really fucked me good,’ Biko said, grimacing.
‘Because you’re an uppity, disrespectful bastard. Bharanzi. Didn’t your father teach you not to answer your elders back?’ Hopewell was forty, though his face was badly lined and tired; he looked like an old man. Only his body, incongruous, unlined, showed his true age. He started the day positive, jovial even, then spun down in the afternoon when the reflected horizon on the iron door fell below the hatch where their water and food was shoved.
‘Respect, comrade,’ Biko announced, leaning on one cheek, pouring a cup of water into his prised, parted buttocks, ‘is something I have for my parents, not for dictators, their quislings and thugs. The dogs.’ Clean, he stood and shook off the drops.
‘You’re a daft Ndebele – what do you know? You lot have always been defeated,’ Hopewell joked.
Biko pulled up his trousers. The pungent, foul odour of decay that had overwhelmed each of them, made them retch when they were first allocated the cell, no longer irritated them.
Samuel spent the first hour of the morning with his head in his hands, talking to the floor, adjusting his gaze, adjusting his expectations for another day. For days after Biko was pushed into the cell, they’d fought. When he first came in, his feet caked in dried blood, he had collapsed on the floor, raving and cursing the police, the president, the entire system, promising retribution that he would personally execute and that he’d lead the charge of the poor and hungry. In his delirium and agony he’d shouted in Shona and Ndebele, ‘Shinga Mushandi Shinga. Qina Sisebenzi Qina. You swines, lackeys, dogs! I’m coming for you!’ Then he’d stayed groaning in the same position on the floor, shivering and shaking, clenching and unclenching in pain, calling out between breaths. Hopewell threw a blanket over him, but cursed the noise and wondered how he’d ever get out with this troublemaker causing such mayhem. He tried again to decipher the night of beer, the fight, the knife he remembered holding, b
ut then the memory broke down and he was left with words, the story he had been told about what had happened. He was convinced now that the police had lied.
*
Louis and Viktor were a strange match, the thin, cerebral, frustrated, awkward internet activist and the gruff, squat, thick, loud racist. In the months that Viktor stayed in Zimbabwe, Louis and Viktor saw or spoke to each other almost every day. There was a craving in both of them, a need or hunger for company and belonging. Viktor spiralled, unmoored, in his hopeless search from London to Harare. Louis, for his part, was too outspoken even for his golf-club friends – unsettled, angry at himself, dissatisfied with the pain around him, the pain he knew that he lived off, the pain in him. They knew who they were to each other, what they could give, what they received.
Louis was a fixer. For a man of such broken parts, this was strange. The family could have left Zimbabwe many times. It had been a topic of conversation for years. The imminent packing – packing for Perth, for Johannesburg, for London – had become a condition of his family life with Vicki. As a young man, after his service in the Rhodesian Army, when the Lancaster House negotiations had signalled the end of Rhodesian history, of white supremacy in Salisbury, his comrades in the army – the last guard – were told to continue the struggle in South Africa. Continue the struggle for white minority rule in Pretoria! The last, most important battle for white culture, for civilisation, was being fought by the apartheid regime at the tip of the continent.
Louis scoffed, even then, not at the racism but at the surrender – the idea that this piffling truce in Rhodesia, this ‘sort of independence’, could dislodge him and his family. Greek his father might have been, but Louis felt Africa in his soul, with all of its rot, its failures, its stench, its blacks. He was staying – though even this had never actually crystallised into an articulated decision. As friends – skinheads from the demobilised army with their revolvers, their Rhodesian flag badges sewn onto kitbags – abandoned their families to struggle for whiteness, Louis stayed. For a time he declaimed, shouted as loud as he wanted about ‘the blacks’, ‘these dogs’ and the mess they had made of his country.
The unholy alliance of unreconstructed racists, with Louis as their exultant representative, and the new black middle class lasted from independence in 1980 to the nineties. When they were not doing business they hated each other – ZANU forcing minor contracts and partnerships on the class of wealthy whites and entitled Rhodesian businessmen.
After a few years the language of socialism and independence had become just empty rhetoric; the white-owned plantations still stretched over the hills of Mutare, the plains of Mashonaland, the fields of crops and cattle and the white families who owned them smug, in control, unruffled. They were like Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, the painting of the eighteenth-century English countryside, but with Mr and Mrs Kappas now standing over their plantations, behind them the extent of their estate, agriculture, livestock in the distance, arable land, crops harvested far into the distance. ‘Everything you see we own.’
The rolling, undisturbed estates, the private landing strips created, in sovereign Zimbabwe, multiple mini-states, states within states, capitalist bubbles. This was the settlement ZANU had negotiated in 1980. Despite his ravings, Louis Kappas had been one of its main beneficiaries.
When the crisis had unravelled the pact of silence and accommodation in the late nineties, Louis had remained implacable. Two years after dinner with the Queen, Mugabe had turned on white interests, the farms, the businesses, the monopolies. Louis bristled, set his jaw, beat his chest and dug in. The talk of leaving Zimbabwe spilled over to the teeming white shopping centres in the cities, the holiday resorts, the clubs and estates. Louis scoffed again. ‘Let the black bastard try – we are not going anywhere.’ To his wife’s despair, his children’s adolescent shrugs, his friends who declared, ‘Louis, you have to see what’s happening. The game is up,’ he only stood wider, more sure.
As Mugabe’s intransigence hardened – the long, painful, blustering speeches – Louis stood surer, let his own anger grow. Intransigence was matched by intransigence, gibe by gibe, insult by insult, racist slur to racist slur. When Mugabe or Moyo or Mnangagwa derided the white community, the entire white planet, Blair and Bush in the North, the monopoly capitalists in the South, Louis would leave his house, walk into the middle of his large Harare lawn and under the sun or moon he would slander out loud and call up the racist gods. Inch for inch, abuse for abuse, Louis took on the president. He would not leave Zimbabwe, ‘this jungle of monkeys’, this Promised Land, because it belonged to him and he was staying.
There was another aspect to Louis’s diatribe of resistance to black tyranny, his one-man war, which he barely acknowledged even to himself: he could not survive away from Zimbabwe. Beneath this recognition there was something else that he never spoke about but that Viktor had seen on their first day together: he had a secret, despairing love for Zimbabwe. Towards those most twisted by the world he served, Louis trembled, felt his soul shudder; his stomach, which held his rage, turned over and over. Unable to find real expression it came out of him as anger; these barriers to feeling masked Louis’s humanity.
To all of the human agony that woke him in the night, forced him to pace the house, he had become a fixer. Louis had his own tragic projects of patronage and development to match ZANU’s. When Vicki asked him about the business, the money from the trucking, the minerals, the coffee, he lied. With the funds he siphoned from his café, from the export of raw materials that were impoverishing the Congo, he supported his staff, paid their children’s school fees, bought bags of mealie-meal and paid hospital bills. He fabricated jobs, created positions, drove past the junction at the bottom of Fourth Avenue in the morning where the unemployed touted for work, hoping to be hired, men of all ages, some still carrying cloth workbags with tools from trades they’d had years before, children who had never worked. In the winter the cold would bite hard at the hands and the crowd would swell, a demonstration of labourers. Men could be seen on the pavements in the scrambled grey of the morning light, washing from buckets, sharing rags to dry themselves, patting away the cold.
Louis would drive past the corner in the early morning, swing his large bakkie into the pavement and slam on his brakes, then elbow open the door of his cab and raise himself on the tailboard to shout, ‘Mangwanani, I need fifteen men.’ Then, in case there was any doubt as to who he was and what he really thought, he swore, ‘Get a fucking move on. I need workers. Real workers.’ He would then drive badly, the bakkie swerving on the road, to let the crowd of men know that he was a white man from the old school.
Once deposited at his warehouse in Willowdale, he would shout again at the men that the sacks of coffee needed to be piled into a pyramid in another corner of the storeroom. The men would look at him, then set to work as Louis paced the floor. Sometimes he would take a few of the hired hands to the café and here there’d be a ridiculous bustle of activity – rearranging the stockroom, cleaning the cleaned floor, sweeping the swept yard.
Setting the men to work on make-believe tasks, Louis fought to keep the scowl on his face. When the work was done the men never entirely left; instead they learnt his system and made requests for loans, for help with their families. And the system? Viktor saw men he recognised coming into the café, staff, temporary workers, even the occasional customer, passing Louis folded notes. Louis would never acknowledge the person but take the note, unfold it, read it, deepen his scowl and nod.
To live in this city, in early-twenty-first-century Zimbabwe, to be white, to have been born Rhodesian, what other options were there? Louis had devised a system.
Even though he shouted at Viktor for implicating himself in the affairs of others, imposing himself when he should not have, fighting fights that were not his, he recognised in himself the same need. He saw in Viktor the same spark of want and knew that here was a man who could no more step away from misery than stop breathing – a man li
ke him.
*
Comrade!
Ridiculous though it may seem to email you so often, to distract you in your important activism, it can’t be helped. Indeed it is an ABSOLUTE necessity. I have been telling everyone about Biko, the arrest and what you are doing. We are already having collections at the university. Jason has printed Free Biko stickers.
Thanks to the African and North African workers’ revolutions I’ve stamped Africa (and Biko) all over every discussion in the university for three months, and now the Africans – the Botswanans, Zimbabweans, South Africans, Ugandans, Nigerians – are very much fortified in confidence coming forward. And – a nice little bonus for you – I have printed off some of your articles from Refutations and they are being passed hand-to-hand.
Did you hear? We had a meeting last night, and I made the piece on the arrests in Bulawayo you wrote background reading. One cleaner said he was ‘unable to put it down’! He lives in a house of South Africans. He has even heard of Nelson. And now everyone – not just you – knows about Biko.
At this stage, many are just starting to get to grips with the fact that in most of the world a young man can lead the charge against a brutal state by doing what we are all doing, discussing and organising. Africa is teaching the West some necessary truths and helping the West to finally grow up and become a political adult in both positive senses: revolutions, and the necessary downside, the horror of what Whitehall, Washington, Brussels have done in Africa for centuries. This is LONG overdue.
I have never been anywhere else but HERE, comrade. I am with you. In the STRUGGLE. THEY tried to silence ME! The fools, the fools! Three states tried to silence, torture and deport me and failed! Though Mugabe came close. And I’m still organising, laughing, loving it. I love Biko without having seen him for several years, because he is Lenin, Luxemburg, Spartacus, Lumumba, Cabral, he is all of them and more! We will free him.