by Zeilig, Leo;
‘I’ve been telling my colleagues about the campaign, about Biko, about the work you’ve been doing, mudiwa,’ Anne-Marie said, taking his arm. Viktor smiled and held out his hand. ‘This is Major, Taffadzwa and Joyce.’
Viktor fumbled in his pocket, found the folded leaflets and handed them out. ‘Ignore the reverse side, it was a printing error.’
Viktor drove. Anne-Marie put her hand on his inner thigh and squeezed. ‘I’m proud of you, Vik. Your focus on the campaign, on Biko.’
‘We have to get him out,’ Viktor replied.
‘I know. We will.’
*
On the day of the demonstration the sun, with its furious, angry rays, tried to grind the protesters into dust. Parched, dry, moving slowly, eight hundred people walked more solemnly than usual, three kilometres through the city, their feet kneading the tarmac softened by the heat. Many turned up to watch, holding Dr Rashid’s leaflet. When they saw hundreds already standing resolute, gathered to march, they buried the flyer in their pockets and entered the cortege.
Despite the regime’s clearance of the informal market and city slums two years before, the streets through the city were still full of children holding up juice cards, hawkers selling footballs, radios and swimming pool inflatables to passing motorists. Men and women in their thirties, forties, and fifties sold mobile phone chargers, the bundles of black wires held like bouquets.
The unusual sight of the protesters neither toyi-toyi-ing nor shouting but quietly walking persuaded others to join, even if Biko’s imprisonment was unknown to them. Street sellers and the homeless also joined the march, so the group of activists soon swelled to resemble an ambulating procession of early twenty-first-century Harare. A well-made banner – End Impunity, Release Political Prisoners – had been printed in South Africa and sent in a diplomatic bag to Care International the previous week – Anne-Marie’s doing. Western-dressed members of the NGO swarm marched at the front of the demonstration with their banner, behind them protesters in worn-out flip-flops and loose T-shirts. As the march approached Chikurubi, the crowd began to pulse with a small current of expectation. Stirring slowly, the protesters began to dance, chant, sing.
Nelson couldn’t contain himself. Turning to Lenin, he spoke: ‘You see, com, this is what Africa looks like now! See the kids, the hawkers, their parents dead, bringing each other up on the street? This is the generation who are going to lead us in the next fight. You see the others?’ He raised both hands in a giant sweep of the whole crowd, the entire planet: ‘The older ones, they still remember our protests in the nineties, the whiff of working-class power on the streets when we marched like this every week. Together these forces will chase the elites from power. You’ll see. The dictatorship hasn’t been able to erase the collective memory of our struggles. Do you see?’ His eyes sparkled.
‘Maybe, comrade, but today the sun is definitely working for the CIO,’ Lenin said, mopping his face with his turned-up shirt.
‘True, true,’ Nelson replied, undeterred, ‘but it will be the police who will suffocate in their imported Chinese uniforms, not us.’ He laughed loudly, tipping back his head, opening his chest.
When the demonstration arrived at the prison fence, some distance from the actual building, they saw a line of soldiers standing stiffly by the gates behind the portable barrier of barbed wire strung between two giant X-frames. Inside the prison compound were two large trucks, the wheels shoulder height, and under the tan canvas hoods two benches full of reinforcements, men holding rifles, ordered not to drink from their canteens, perspiring into their fastened collars. A few metres behind them a tank was parked inside the prison, its large gun pointed at the protesters. The tank’s appearance was incongruous: not a display of strength and the state’s confident monopoly of violence but, in the exaggeration and overstatement, a symbol of weakness and vulnerability.
The entire effect of the army, the guns, the tank, the officials speaking into mobile phones, was strangely comical, like a dress rehearsal to a modern production of Rigoletto, Viktor fancied. The regime was playing at control, pretending to go into battle.
The poles of the banners were planted in the dry earth. Anne-Marie, who had been holding one side of End Impunity, moved away, turned her phone to the side and photographed the crowd. She shielded her hand over the phone’s miniature screen as she posted the photo to a group set up by Viktor, who had explained to her how it worked the previous night over a bottle of South African wine stolen from her office.
The initial solemnity of the march had completely disappeared. The crowd now faced the army and police, staring at the reflections of their brothers, sons, lovers, sweating under the same sun, hating the morning, averting their eyes from the demonstrators, desperate not to capture the disapproval and reproach.
Nelson stood on an upturned box he’d brought with him. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that enlarged his eyes, exposing his face to closer inspection. He waved away the offer of a megaphone; he was an orator and his voice, a rough, gravelly baritone, could easily carry across the car park to the crowd and to the prison.
A group of adolescents, many without shoes, had started to dance and sing with immense vitality, driving dust into the air. A ripple of movement reverberated through the demonstration until others shuffled on bent legs, women lifted their skirts, men their trousers and legs moved to the cries, hoots and long, wavering ululations of the protesters. There was a call and response when a woman shouted, ‘Can I get an amen?’ The group of dancers, lifting their knees in great stationary steps, replied, ‘Give him glory!’
Effortlessly, over the jubilation, Nelson boomed, ‘You see? This is how we fight for freedom!’
A cheer exploded across the crowd. From the thick of the group, several women cried out, directing the chant to a shrill ‘Jesus is Number One!’ The response came almost immediately from the dancers, ‘Mugabe is Number Two, Number Two.’
‘Did you hear that, old man?’ Nelson shouted. ‘Number Two! You are Number Two!’ Viktor allowed his hood to fall, his hair smeared wet against his head. The dancing stopped and people turned to Nelson. Some sat, spreading out on the ground.
As Nelson spoke again, a policeman who, with a group of his men, had tailed the demonstration from the city tried to interrupt him, coming up to the impromptu podium. He complained that while they had been permitted the march, which he had personally sanctioned, no speeches would be allowed; the officer also explained that they were certainly not allowed to bring God and the president into the proceedings. Jeers and heckling drove the police officer back to the line of soldiers and police. As the man retreated, Nelson did not join the cheers. For the first time that day he felt worried. Experience had taught him to fear a humiliated police officer; only a stupid man did not know fear.
There was something restless about the day. The bright heat gave way to a breeze that worked up goose pimples on the crowd, forcing Lenin to rub his bare arms. Nelson raised his arms in the air, commanding, trying to silence the demonstration, but it was not the day for speeches. The crowd jostled, pushed forward, lifted on the tide of their subversive good humour, the sense of invulnerability that the catcalls, joking, slogans had given them. Nelson was used to being listened to, but his voice couldn’t be distinguished in the voices and laughter.
The chanting and dancing continued. People pushed forward past Nelson, towards the fence, the guarded gate. A woman in a pink skirt and white blouse with a huge girth swung her hips, screamed, rubbed her feet into the gravel. A mist of dust rose around her. The crowd parted, gave her size and movement space. She stepped out suddenly to the gate, in front of Nelson, and seemed to swell in size, enlarge her width and height, eclipse the prison on the near horizon. The lines of police, the empty army trucks, troops in ill-fitting helmets and uniforms, stood in formation, their rifles diagonal across their chests. Suddenly the woman turned her back on the soldiers, raised her skirt and bent, displaying her great buttocks to the lines of uniformed
men, their magnificent volume and shape challenging the army, challenging even the clouded sun to come out, show itself, do its best. Everyone laughed. The woman continued to move, skirts raised, shaking her enormous cheeks of flesh. Other women came forward, adding their own witticisms. They too lifted their skirts. In a second there was a row of buttocks, one buttock for each gun. The line of women sent the crowd into a fiercer frenzy of laughter, as if this creaturely demonstration of forbidden, hidden flesh allowed each of them to expel the decade of hunger.
People started to shout again, ‘Chinja, chinja!’ ‘Jambanja!’ ‘The Final Push!’ ‘Shame on you, let our grandmothers through!’ As the skirts were dropped and the women rejoined the crowd, a new cry began: ‘Free Biko! Free Biko!’ Quickly the mood changed to fury. People surged forward. The first to reach the gate gripped and held on as they were pushed by the lines of protesters behind them.
The sound of shredding and ripping was heard as placards were stripped of cardboard. Instead of a wave of paper slogans, the crowd now carried sticks. Under the great surge of bodies, the troops inside the prison compound moved almost in a single movement, their order broken. If the regime had set itself against the flesh and bones of Zimbabweans, declared war on nature, now their naked buttocks, their arms and muscles, had come for revenge. The heavy sticks that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere were passed to those closest to the police, positioned near the fence and gate. At the back of the crowd several women had started to dig and claw at the hard ground for stones and small rocks, lifting and passing them to a hastily organised chain. Younger hands sent the stones to the front from hand to hand; the tendons on the women’s arms strained under the weight of their work.
Viktor was caught inside the group, pushed and pressed by the bodies around him. A woman stood next to him with a baby in her arms, the child’s face dirty and passive. She raised the child in her arms, over the heads of those in front of her, tears in her eyes; the child was her banner and slogan, her protest. Others shouted, ‘Mealie, mealie, mealie!’ Soon the shouting, the different slogans, the demands to eat, to free Biko, layered the air, filled the prison, frightened the soldiers. These men, as young as the men in the crowd, bashful and confused, clutching their guns to their bodies guiltily, could not answer the complaints of the crowd, bring back the needless dead, face them, the world, speak to the old man.
The soldiers saw their chance to reclaim their line and shuffled back into formation.
Over the gate, onto the bent, helmeted heads of the assembled soldiers, the sky darkened as missiles, stones and sticks were thrown. The police were stunned, disorientated by the sudden turn to violence by these ramshackle troublemakers in their rags and flip-flops. The crowd, the entire mass moving against the gate, pushed further into itself, concentrating its weight on the weakest, most penetrable section of the prison fence. Viktor noticed a few better-dressed people, who, minutes before, had held the large plastic banner, squeeze through the crowd, shouting to the crowd to let them through. Viktor searched the crowd for Nelson and Anne-Marie. He saw them together closer to the gate, their faces twisted, their mouths shouting, appealing to the police. Words were shouted in Shona: ‘Sunungurai musungwa uyo, Regai tidarike!’ The front of the crowd lunged forward. The gate, gripped in a hundred hands, was wrenched from its hinges; the thin metal chain attached to a post was pulled easily from the ground like a cork from a bottle. The sky continued to hail stones and rocks on the police and the troops. One officer shouted into his cupped hands, ordering his men. Four soldiers strained to drag the coils of razor wire, strung between wooden frames, to block the crowd, slow down the stampede. The troops had now regrouped on either side of the truck, the butts of their rifles nestling into their shoulders. The long barrels quivered and shook.
Once the gate had been cast aside and prison security breached, the mood of the crowd changed again. Nelson shouted, stood in front of the crowd, among the first ranks of young men and women inside the prison compound. The police stood back on either side of the gate, their pistols held in shaking hands, pointed at the crowd, at those who stood inside the prison. The commanding officer, a small man with a pocked face and red eyes, screamed into a radio. Nelson heard the shouted commands, turned quickly to the soldiers, moved towards the officer and with his fingers on each side of his shirt pulled. Buttons flew and spun into the air. With one hand he pointed to his chest and shouted again to the police. There was a murmur of agreement in the crowd. Others stepped forward, men and women, and did the same thing, copied Nelson, ripped open their shirts, exposed their chests and pointed.
The woman next to Viktor pressed her child to him; the small infant clung to his neck as the mother removed her T-shirt, stood with her breasts exposed and shouted so her voice broke. The great compact crowd with their bare hearts challenged the police, the soldiers, to fire – the boys sweating and shaking behind their rifles. Those further back raised their sticks and metal pipes above their heads, addressing the prison and its protectors, bearing witness.
The stand-off lasted for two minutes. The two groups were separated by a few paces, Nelson at the front, the raised arms of the police and soldiers trembling and the stripped bodies of the crowd wet, fleshy, vulnerable. Viktor held the child tightly to him. The boy’s soft head sank into the nape of his neck. Instinctively he turned his body so his back faced the lines of police. He bent his head over the child’s body and inhaled the deep, hot odour, whispered the few words of Shona he knew: ‘Mudiwa, mudiwa ndino kuda.’
As Viktor embraced the child, his back turned, he saw in the distance, on the crest of the hill, two trucks driving side by side. As they approached, billowing dust and fumes, he could make out the khaki canvas hoods and the large wheels. He started to shout and point, tried to alert those around him, but it was too late. The trucks skidded to a halt and from them police and soldiers streamed out and rushed the crowd. The demonstrators turned, screaming warnings to each other as the soldiers brought the butts of their rifles down. The crowd broke open, dispersed, stumbled, fell. People were hit and bloodied, the single united force wrenched and bludgeoned apart. Viktor ran, leapt over fallen bodies, shielding the boy.
Anne-Marie tried to escape, but a soldier stuck out his foot and she fell. He leant over her body, grabbed the heavy string-and-bead necklace she wore and tore it from her throat, pulling her body back; the string burnt and tore her skin, drawing blood. As Anne-Marie screamed, he drove his fist into her mouth. She choked, collapsed to the ground, turned to her side. He kicked her in the small of the back, then knelt and curled his arm around her neck and tensed, snapping her mouth shut. She gagged.
‘You’re not so strong now, woman. This is what ZANU does if you disobey. Munofunga tiri mapenzi. Ndiri kuenda netyava. You think we are just grade fours and you are very educated, you think you are now so learned and there is nothing that we can do to you. You think we are stupid? ZANU is now going to discipline you. When we meet you on the street, you treat us as uneducated people. So there is no way you can ever love us. You think you are special, so today I will reduce you to size.’
Later she remembered the sensation of the young man’s breath on her cheek, the moment before Lenin brought down the rock on the man’s head. At once the soldier released and fell back. The gash on his forehead opened for a second – the wound white, the flesh peeled back to the skull – then filled with blood. A red tide flowed over his face and into his eyes, blinding him. Lenin dropped the rock and looped his arm around Anne-Marie’s back. He lifted her and half-dragging, half-running, they fled.
*
The next day Nelson’s flat was raided, not to seize files or gather intelligence but simply to bludgeon and destroy – not completely, but enough. When the group arrived, Nelson kicking the door ajar, they fell onto their haunches, clutched their heads and moaned. The two makeshift benches were broken; the old computer lay in a bed of shattered glass. The posters, the gallery of photos and placards, were torn down. The photo of the Soc
iety of Liberated Minds standing outside in the sun, their arms raised in permanent celebration, was gone. The single desk stood lame beside the windows, two legs kicked away. On the desktop, exactly in the centre, a soldier had defecated. Next to the coiled mound of shit was a skid mark. The policeman, his trousers down, had crouched on the desk and defecated and then, for reasons unknown, he had moved the faeces into the centre of the table.
Viktor entered the room and stood over his folded comrades. He surveyed the damage, made an inventory and began planning how he could appeal for funds to replace the equipment. He looked at the desk, pondered the meaning, the organisation – this element of style and design, feng shui brought to the problems of destruction and bowel movements. Had the soldiers planned which of them was going to defecate? Commanded the man who had drawn the short straw, told him to hold in his morning crap until the allotted time? The confidence, the sheer audacity of the act. Could Viktor, if it came to it, release his bowels and shit in front of his comrades? Could he shit to order? Had the man then used his ungloved hand to move the shit into its ergonomic position? Or had that responsibility fallen to the commanding officer, or maybe a new recruit? If only Viktor could get to the bottom of this mystery, to the real essence, he would be able to understand how the regime worked, the inner logic of Zimbabwe, and the entire fraught and jumbled world of excrement, genitals and sex. What did it all mean?