by Zeilig, Leo;
Samuel continued, ‘Some prison guards were hurt. The dogs were scared.’ The men laughed, recognising Biko in the story, in the words Samuel used. ‘Biko organised the protest. And when they took his body, the other prisoners shouted louder. A guard came to the door and unlocked it and left it unlocked all night. I walked around the floor, greeting the other prisoners. All of them knew Biko. They had heard the stories about his jambanja, his fighting the guards. They told me that. When I went back to the cell, I had new blankets and there was a bowl of stew. Proper stew. I fell asleep and woke in the night and the cell had the light of the sky. I could feel Biko there with me, by the window, looking out. To see the moon.’ Tiring again, he stopped. Then, remembering, he said quickly, ‘He never spoke. I told him to give them what they wanted’ – again he paused, overwhelmed – ‘but he never did. He never gave them anything. He kept me amupenyu.’
Stalin said, ‘Alive.’
‘Alive,’ Samuel repeated. ‘I owe him.’ He looked round at the attentive faces. ‘Everything.’ He smiled again. ‘He knew everything. He had answers to all suffering. How to end it, you know. Are you the same?’
‘We try, we try,’ Lenin muttered, doubtfully, modestly. There was a moment of silence in the car that no one tried to fill.
Finally, Viktor spoke. ‘Let’s get out of here before they arrest us.’ The two men in the front swivelled round. Nelson turned the key, leant his weight into the gear stick and eased the car away.
*
Society members came, visiting the Calder Gardens flat like New Testament witnesses to the birth of Christ. Amused, touched, thankful, Samuel dutifully repeated the story of their comrade’s last days, recalling his last stand. For a few days Samuel seemed to be the only person who really knew Biko, and his presence allowed them to feel Biko, however fleeting and uncertain, once more.
The group held onto Samuel with a fervour, to appease their grief; when he wanted to leave they tried to persuade him to stay. ‘Just another day, com. One more night.’ He stayed for five days, then travelled south to Shangani to see his family. Slightly fattened, his eyes still hollowed out, Samuel left. They were reluctant to let him go and when he did the group felt raw with loss – deepened by Samuel’s departure, taking with him the final secret of Biko’s life and reminding them of his perpetual absence.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was a short distance along the undulating, low summits and shallow valleys to the marked grave already dug in a crowded cemetery where Biko’s mother was buried, where his grandparents also lay, slowly giving themselves back to the continent. Above each grassy mound was a small wooden cross.
Biko’s comrades in the Society of Liberated Minds had nailed a further diagonal plank to the standard-issue cross and painted the wood red, managing to turn Jesus’s crucifixion into a communist star. The star, roughly nailed together, was carried at the front of the cortege by two of Biko’s student comrades from Bulawayo. Etched on the star, chiselled into the wood, were the words:
Shinga Mushandi Shinga! Qina Msebenzi Qina!
Stephan ‘Biko’ Mutawurwa
1978–2012
Revolutionary, Intellectual, Student, Brother
Then:
RIP
But this had been crudely scratched out, and the words written with a black marker:
Let There Be No Rest Until We Have Peace and Socialism
Lenin fell back until he was walking alongside Viktor and Nelson. The two older men, drops of perspiration on their foreheads, were both silent with the effort of the walk. Nelson draped an arm over Viktor’s shoulder. ‘You see, Viktor, this is how we bury our dead in Zim. We march with Biko to say that he is not alone and that we will soon be with him. Look at our numbers.’
It was true: This was the strangest funeral. Maybe a hundred and fifty people were walking and dancing to the grave, each having left the cities, their rural areas, begged, hitched and borrowed to attend the ceremony.
‘He was a popular comrade. His brothers and sisters loved him.’ Lenin slackened his pace, slowing for the men to catch him, keep apace. Viktor had not known a funeral to be so voluble. The occasion made Lenin want to speak. ‘You know, comrade, I have a question for you.’
Viktor nodded, indicating to him to go on.
‘Comrade Marx was a brilliant man, the world leader of communism. No one his equal. Pro-poor and for the working class.’
‘You mean Karl Marx?’ Viktor asked, wishing that Nelson would drop his damn arm, stop leaning on him, and carry his own weight.
‘Yes, yes, Comrade Marx.’
‘Well, yes, you are right. He was a brilliant man,’ Viktor replied.
Nelson was panting, interrupted, excitable. ‘Nothing gave him more pleasure than to know that the working class read and studied his books. Remember what he said? “This is a consideration that outweighs everything else”.’ Nelson coughed and leant harder on Viktor’s shoulders, slowing them. Lenin, impatient, moved in front of the two men, bouncing on his feet. He walked backwards, his energy like a child’s.
Nelson continued, ‘Marx wanted to make Capital more accessible to workers and the poor, but he refused to dilute his ideas. He knew that to understand capitalism would require a great effort. He raged against impatience and zealous seekers of the truth.’
‘Yes, yes, I know, comrade.’ Lenin again walked alongside the men.
Unperturbed, Nelson resumed his lecture breathlessly. ‘There is no royal road to science; only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths will reach the dizzying summits.’
Behind them the large group of mourners was led by a line of students, shouting, ‘Down with Mugabe! Pasi naMugabe! Biko ndiye wekutanga! Biko is Number One, Number One!’ The students – many faces Viktor recognised – stopped. The crowd bunched up behind them. They kicked their feet in the air, sang louder, bent low to the ground, twisted their torsos and then, on a signal, rushed forward, screaming in mock battle.
From the small summit on the crest of the hill, Viktor and Nelson could see into the valley the muddied, packed cemetery, row upon row of crosses. Ahead of them mourners prepared to lower the coffin into the narrow, dug-out rectangle, a mound of rust-brown earth heaped beside the hole.
Lenin now had his chance. He seized it. ‘Exactly, so if comrade Marx was a giant, for the workers, the poor, all of us—’
‘Yes?’ Viktor answered.
Lenin smiled, triumphant. ‘If he was this great fighter for the poor, why were there only seventeen people at his funeral?’
Lenin let the question fall.
Viktor and Nelson were silent. Lenin pressed his point. ‘While Biko, hardly known in the world, has attracted this rally, a great crowd.’
Nelson turned to Lenin, this young puppy of a comrade bouncing beside him. ‘I have never thought of it like that, comrade,’ he answered honestly.
‘A good question,’ Viktor agreed.
The funeral procession reached the small, flat cemetery. The sun squeezed through the heavy cloud, shone beams of light on the divided plots. Biko’s coffin and the thick crowd were hit by a ray of light. The circle around the dug-out plot opened to allow more mourners to see the grave, the coffin, Biko’s last moments above ground next to the carefully marked hole, the spades stuck in the earth, the two cemetery diggers in stained overalls. Lenin arranged the assembly, running, pointing, indicating space, shouting orders, commanding life. Viktor stood back and looked over the heads of the crowd. Anne-Marie stepped beside him.
Viktor inhaled sharply. Even from this distance the geometry was clear: the coffin was a full head larger than the grave.
‘They’ve made a mistake,’ Viktor said softly to Anne-Marie.
‘What mistake?’ she asked.
‘Biko is not going to fit into that hole.’
‘Yes, he will.’
‘No. I can see from here – the hole is about half a metre too short.’
The crowd stood between the packed graves, the s
mall mounds of ploughed earth, crosses, dried flowers, dog-eared photos peeling away from their frames, bleached in the sun. Mourners stood awkwardly astride the graves, anxious not to step on the dead, straddling the plots.
‘That’s normal practice these days,’ Anne-Marie replied.
‘Normal practice?’
‘It costs. There are already too many graves in the cemetery. Look.’ Anne-Marie spread her arms out. ‘So they dig the graves deeper and narrower.’
‘To save money?’ Viktor asked.
‘To save money,’ Anne-Marie repeated.
Slow to awareness, his brow stitched, his face tightening. ‘So they are going put his coffin in diagonally? Upright?’
‘Not completely upright. Diagonal, as you say.’
Viktor was confused, disappointed that Anne-Marie seemed undisturbed by this fact. ‘Fuck!’ he said.
‘Considering the circumstances, does it really matter?’
Viktor didn’t answer immediately. The full assembly had descended the hill and jostled noisily in the cemetery. People laughed. The singing and slogans heard on the procession started to fade. There was hope, expectation, resolution as obvious and evident as life, as Biko’s blind, subversive determination to dominate death.
‘Of course it matters. Biko is entitled to lie flat, to rest on his back! It’s madness.’
‘There is too much competition for space. Too many people are dying. There is a premium on length.’
Viktor’s voice rose. ‘Biko needs to lie flat. He needs rest.’
‘This is Zimbabwe, mudiwa.’
‘Are we not allowed a proper bed even in death? So we can yawn, reach out, be ourselves? He is going to be there for eternity!’
Anne-Marie laughed. ‘Eternity? Isn’t it more appropriate that Biko is partly upright? He was a man who lived on his feet, Viktor.’
Viktor pondered the argument. ‘But he’s not even going to be upright. He’ll forever be at a forty-five-degree angle. Neither on his feet nor his back. Permanently in between.’
Nelson came out of the circle; he nodded to Lenin, who shouted in Shona for the crowd to be quiet. The grassy amphitheatre carried his voice and threw his words over the hills.
‘Biko was a revolutionary before anything else. Before he joined us, he was one. As a boy, maybe as a suckling child. You see, he had always said, “Take me. Take what I have. What skills I have. What money I have. What strength I have. What energy I have.” As a revolutionary, that’s what Biko said. “Take all of me.” Every fibre of his life was directed at destroying the world of oppression, not only in Zimbabwe but everywhere. Biko knew what no one else did: that not an inch could be conceded in that struggle against oppression. As soon as the body bends in apology, it can be broken.’
Nelson raised himself to his full height, speaking freely, openly. ‘Biko knew that in Zimbabwe in the last fifteen years, life was not the flowering of spring blossoms on our jacaranda trees but an endless struggle against death. Our lives are spent avoiding hunger and violence. Life as despair. Existence’ – with a wide sweep of his arms he enveloped the entire crowd, the valley and hills – ‘has become simply this slide into death.’ He paused, rested.
Viktor felt his life lift into his mouth, his cheeks filling, his mind driven to a single point. The crowd, his friends and comrades, stood still, the sun covering them. Each of Nelson’s words seemed to have been spoken directly by the crowd. Their speaking hearts were opening and closing, telling the story of their lovers, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers swept aside.
And now Nelson spoke again, his words pressing on the rags they wore, conquering their fears to overcome the defeat and loss entangling their minds and bodies. The old fear that despair would simply endure forever was now replaced by this strange communal voice.
‘Our enemy has become fatalism; the hope that we can turn around our lives, our society, bring real chinja, a new government to power, and build something from these ruins. Often we feel that the only arbiter, the only saviour to a life of suffering, is death. Death will have us all, even the old man and ZANU, and there is no mystery in that.’ The crowd groaned in agreement. ‘But remember: once our chinja determined the world. Now we say: Let God cut down ZANU.’
The crowd sighed again in agreement.
Nelson’s face glistened; his head ran with perspiration. He breathed in deeply and then, indicating with an open hand the coffin behind him, said, ‘Biko stood against this fatalism. He took away from God responsibility for our mistakes and our tasks, comrades. The struggle to end our suffering is our responsibility. No matter the temptations of individual advancement, quick fixes, the perils of ZANU and MDC, the rich pickings of the NGOs, any of these things. Biko could have chosen, if he wanted, to be a well-paid leader of his generation. Maybe then he would still be alive today.
‘Our age of instant and twenty-four-hour internet-based communication, individualism, is the curse that bedevils us. A refusal, an inability to see beyond the screen, the computer, to what has been accomplished before, to a time of collective interests over the individual; to the internet generation it is only their efforts, their interests – a desire for immediate gratification.
‘It is against this world in the name of collective humanity that we go into battle. Socialism and original Christianity are the two great traditions. Christ, not as the activist of first resort, but the representative of the credo, “Do unto others as you would like them to do unto you”.
‘And Biko knew that from Marx and Jesus arose Stalin, Judas Iscariot, the Scribes, the Pharisees, who claimed their identity to humanity’s project. To these false prophets Biko rose and spoke. With practice, practice, practice we test our lives and the ideas we hold.’
Stopping briefly, wiping his forearm across his face, Nelson continued, ‘Biko committed himself to the struggle, to his allotment of life. He gave us an ounce of practice and when one gives, makes the gift of practice for the common good, we do not need to be sad when they leave us. Biko is still with us – in our bellies, in our minds, in our souls, comrades.’
There were louder exclamations, shouting.
‘We are the in-between era, trying to fulfil the next steps, to build movements for socialism. We are like the twentieth-century founders who sought to carve out the first parties. From Biko we can learn much.’
Nelson now turned directly to the coffin. Everyone was still, half-expecting Nelson to announce that Biko had avoided death, had somehow remained intransigent even to the call of his own morality and that, with a wave of Nelson’s hand, the flimsy chipboard coffin lid would burst open. After all, such a box was an insult to Biko’s unbound spirit. To Nelson’s instructions he would emerge from the coffin and without pause condemn fatalism and death, lead a march to State House, a human snake growing as they weaved through Gweru and Mashonaland to Harare in a line of humanity longer even than life.
Viktor was not the only one in the crowd to imagine that Biko would appear to them. He saw Biko roll aside the rock sealing the cave, letting air flood in before he sang, like Radamès in Verdi’s Aida:
Oh heaven, farewell, farewell.
Earth is opening for us.
Dream of joy which in sorrow fades.
For us earth opens and our traveling souls
Fly to the light of eternal day.
But Nelson continued softly addressing the coffin. ‘You have fought a good fight, comrade, and we give you a revolutionary salute.’ Then he spoke even more quietly: ‘Tomorrow, before we are dead, people may decide to establish socialism, and others may be cowardly and helpless enough to try and defeat them. But in this event, socialism will be human truth, and so much the better for us. In reality things will be, as they have always been, as we have decided they should be.’
Nelson raised his fist, trying and failing to stop his arm from shaking. Unevenly, quietly, other fists and hands were raised until the salute, a mixture of open hands and clenched fists, were lifted into the sky, holding up the
blue, dispelling the clouds.
Lenin shouted, ‘Fists, fists, comrades, not those Y-Party hands of surrender – the fist for Biko, a revolutionary salute!’
Nelson finished. ‘Take your rest well, comrade. You have lit the fire burning inside of us.’ His voice broke. ‘Without you the going will be tough, but we have no choice until some of our comrades form part of the next wave.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Viktor organised all of his emails carefully. He had set up a system of labels and tags, filters to apply tags automatically. Every inconsequential reminder to pay a fine, every message to confirm a meeting, each two-line email from his father were labelled precisely and archived for safekeeping: Your mother and I are worried about you and want to see you. We have decided that you have the same tendency to ruminate as Uncle Max. I need your help to fix the leak in the bathroom. Isaac&Sonia. Bills. Rosa. Nina. Writings. Mutations. The organisation of his virtual universe, his electronic housekeeping, belied a world in disorder.
Since news of Biko’s death had reached them Viktor had struggled to sleep. The nights had been hot; the room, even with the windows open, was stagnant. He hadn’t slept – aware each time he fought his way to unconsciousness, for momentary escape, rest, that he would soon need to wake. The days came early, so goddamn eager to start, to forbid any escape. The insistence in Harare to act, to lay bare, to present yourself, confronted Viktor each morning.