The Cuban

by Paul Eksteen

  There were talks of contract workers to be employed, and these workers should not reside on the farms. The old workers’ houses must be demolished, and squatters must be chased off the properties. Drastic measures indeed.

  “These workers will never stop voting for the ruling party,” one farmer explained. “They tell us all the time of how awful things are in the New South Africa, but they are not willing to do anything about it. It is like us whites, we would tell everyone how terrible and oily KFC tastes, but we keep buying it.”

  I sat in the corner and listened to an upset community. Some of the farmers had valid points to make, but many of them were just stirring the pot. They were full of bravado, emboldened by beer, and the majority of them would forget whatever was said today when they woke up the next morning.

  There was an old saying, that a Boer would greet everyone without leaving the party whilst an Englishman would leave the party without greeting anyone.

  I decided that I had enough for one day and pulled the Englishman stunt.

  ***

  Polokwane

  Kwinzee woke at seven and treated himself to a hot shower and some pap with four softly baked eggs on top. After breakfast he took another nap for two hours and left for Papillon at one in the afternoon.

  Once at the office, he swapped his car for a bakkie, and loaded it with rope, duct tape and cable ties. The bakkie was not licensed yet, so he placed a temporary garage plate on the dashboard. He collected another set of number plates, from a vehicle written off in an accident a few months ago, and placed it behind the seat of the bakkie.

  His next stop was in Seshego, the black township next to Polokwane. Here he obtained an unlicensed, snub-nosed, .38 Special revolver, with ten rounds of ammunition. He paid his connection a thousand rand in cash and promised to return the revolver for a five-hundred-rand refund.

  He then stopped at the nearest KFC, to buy himself a barrel of the finger lickin’ good stuff. After filling the bakkie’s diesel tank, he headed back towards Indermark.

  He had a plan formulated in his head and if everything went well, tonight would be the end of the two murderers.

  His loyalty towards Tom Allen was the driving force behind what was about to happen tonight. Although, Kwinzee thought by himself, for the first time in his adult life, there was another factor governing him. Hatred. Not xenophobia as such, but a hatred for the people who make this country, for which he had fought so hard, an undesirable place to live in.

  He phoned Lebo on his way and made arrangements to collect her the following day. He would have to have lunch with the family in Venda and have to arrive early. These family lunches were not something that could be treated without the necessary respect.

  Once at Indermark, he drove around looking for the ideal site to execute the plan which he had formulated in his head. The Kgobokanang primary school close to the tavern was his first option. There was a playing area with a jungle gym and some swings at the side of the school, underneath some huge rubber and seringa trees.

  His next option was across the road from the ModjhaDji general dealer. This site was next to another soccer field, with a huge tree with a suitable overhanging branch. The only problem was that it was right in the open. He liked the tree though.

  He drove around for another ten minutes until he found the site where, on Sundays, the local tribal chief would hold his indaba. It was situated at the end of the settlement, with only a few houses close to it. This was more what he was looking for.

  The site was an open piece of ground with a huge marula tree in the middle. Selected elders would gather there on Sundays with the chief, to hold indaba, whilst drinking a home-brewed beer, served in calabashes by young maidens. The chief would sit on an upright tree stump, with the elders sitting on the ground around him.

  After properly inspecting the site, Kwinzee returned to the TUT bar and parked his bakkie behind the brick wall at the far side of the tavern. There were no lights shining on his bakkie from the tavern. There were also no streetlights.

  He got out of the bakkie and went into the tavern for a beer, his main reason to see if the two murderers were there before him.

  Zvombo and Chatunga were indeed already there, sitting at the same table as the night before. Kwinzee bought a beer at the bar and, standing in a dark corner, watched the two murderers, whilst slowly finishing his beer. He was still on medication, and was going to restrict his alcohol intake tonight, before the job at hand.

  He then left the tavern half an hour after entering it and went to his bakkie. The bakkie he had chosen for the job at hand was equipped with a steel canopy with no windows. He fitted the false number plates and waited inside the bakkie, eating some of the cold leftover KFC, while waiting for ten o’clock.

  Just after ten he went back into the tavern and ordered a beer at the bar. He sipped very slowly on his beer and waited for the right opportunity. It did not take long before the one who was addressed as Zvombo by the waitress the night before, stood up and walked towards the men’s room.

  This was his chance. Kwinzee walked towards Chatunga and stopped behind him. He bent over forward and whispered in his ear, “Follow me outside, I’ve got a job for you.”

  He immediately turned around and leisurely left the tavern, walking to the back of his bakkie. This was where things might go wrong. If Chatunga didn’t follow him and decided to wait for Zvombo, things might get tricky. He was in no condition to take both these murderers on at once. He had to divide and conquer.

  Kwinzee sighed a sigh of relief when he looked over his shoulder and saw that Chatunga was indeed following him. He had placed a leather cosh, with a piece of lead woven into the one end, on the bumper of the bakkie.

  As Chatunga walked around the back of the vehicle, Kwinzee smacked him a blow across the head. Chatunga dropped like a mule, and it took Kwinzee less than five minutes to gag, tie his hands and feet with cable ties and deposit him into the back of the bakkie. Luckily these Zimbabweans were skinny people.

  He then returned to the tavern to find Zvombo sitting alone at the table, looking around for his friend. Kwinzee walked up to Zvombo and told him that Chatunga was waiting outside and that he wanted to talk to them about a job.

  He again left the tavern. This time with Zvombo in tow. Zvombo was not expecting any foul play, and five minutes later was lying next to his friend in the back of the bakkie.

  With the two Zimbabweans safely secured inside the canopy of the bakkie, Kwinzee drove to the chiefs’ indaba ground. When he got there, he drove up to the marula tree and reversed underneath it.

  He switched off the bakkie’s lights and waited for ten minutes. The two in the back were dead still.

  Chatunga was the smaller of the two, so Kwinzee decided that he would be the first candidate.

  He pulled the still unconscious Chatunga out from under the canopy and dropped him onto the ground. He then dragged him towards the tree and placed him against the trunk.

  He secured the one end of a ten-metre ski rope around Chatunga’s neck, and a rock to the other end of the rope. He threw the rock over a sturdy branch from the marula tree; selected as the branch was about three metres from the ground.

  He collected the rope with the rock tied to it and secured it with a slip knot to the tow bar of the bakkie. Without switching on the bakkie’s lights and making sure that the cabin light was switched off, he slowly drove the bakkie forward until he could see Chatunga hanging with his feet half a metre off the ground. He stopped the bakkie and switched it off while in first gear, engaging the hand brake to stop it from moving backwards.

  He got out of the bakkie, pulled on the rope to get Chatunga’s feet a few more inches from the ground and to get some slack on the rope, and undid the slip knot. He moved closer to the tree whilst keeping strain on the rope and tied the rope around the trunk of the tree.

  Next, he dumped Zvombo on the ground next to the tree trunk. He got back into the bakkie and drove to the side of the clearance
and parked the bakkie between some sickle bushes.

  He took the revolver from the glove compartment, collected a grass broom from the back of the bakkie, and wiped all tracks from the site.

  When he got to the tree, he jerked on the rope a few times to make sure that Chatunga would never kill innocent people again. He placed the chief’s tree stump on its side below the hanging killer.

  He then removed the gags and cable ties from both his victim’s arms and legs, making sure that Zvombo was still unconscious. He still had the grass broom with him, and again wiped away as much evidence of car tracks and footprints as he could.

  He removed the revolver and a piece of cheesecloth from his pocket. He wrapped the cheesecloth around the barrel and cylinder of the revolver in his right hand until nothing of the gun was visible.

  He then walked up to Zvombo and shot him from the right side in the head. The gun went off with a bang, much less noisy than normally, but still loud enough to be heard for a few hundred metres.

  He quickly wiped his fingerprints from the gun, placed it in Chatunga’s hand to get his prints on the gun, and then deposited it in Chatunga’s pocket. He quickly moved away from line of sight of the houses at the edge of the clearing and made his way between shrubs and bushes to the bakkie.

  He waited for ten minutes to see if anyone was going to investigate the noise of the shot, but when no one appeared, he started the bakkie and drove to Polokwane.

  Kwinzee hated autumn. The time of melancholy, the time of death. His spirits fell each year with the soggy leaves and revived only in September with the start of spring.

  Psychiatric statistics proved that the highest suicide rate occurred in the spring, the time for rebirth and growth. Kwinzee could never understand it, if he was ever to jump off a cliff, it would be in the depressing months of autumn or winter.

  Just like Chatunga, who had shot his friend and then killed himself.

  At least the immediate threat in Vivo was sorted, he thought. Now Tom could relax and get on with his day-to-day problems at the office.

  How wrong he was about that.

  CHAPTER 22

  Far Northern Limpopo — Sunday, 29 March

  We left the following morning at dawn for the game farm near Mapungubwe.

  As we left Vivo, we passed a string of twelve copper-carrying trucks, coming from the front.

  Currently, most of Zambia’s copper is moved by trucks to either ports at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania or to Durban in South Africa. The hundred-year-old railway system that was built during the British colonial rule, as part of the vision of the Cape-to-Cairo railway, was in a poor state and not designed to carry the heavy load of more than two million tonnes of copper per year.

  It was a pity that the old railway network was being left to disintegrate, as it used to carry thousands of tonnes of freight and passengers all over Africa, until the late 1960s.

  A famous project in colonial times was the building of the railway bridge which started in March 1898, over the Tsavo River in Kenya. The purpose of the project was to link Uganda with the Indian Ocean at Kilindini Harbour in Kenya.

  During nine months of construction, two mane-less male lions stalked the construction campsite, dragging labourers from their tents at night, and devouring them.

  Hundreds of workers fled from Tsavo, halting construction of the bridge. By the time the lions were eventually killed in December of 1898 by John Patterson, the project leader of this section of the railway, more than a hundred workers had been killed.

  Good news for South Africa was that Chinese investors in Zambia were in the process of building a new six-hundred-kilometre railway, connecting the country’s vast copper mines to the port of Lobito in Angola on the Atlantic coast.

  This might leave the road system in South Africa in a much better state and minimise the deaths of innocent South Africans such as Antoinette.

  James was already walking the fence line when I caught up with him. He told me that all the watering points were in a hundred per cent working order. He climbed onto the back of the bakkie with the two girls, and soon I could hear them giggle at his stories.

  We drove around the farm for an hour, inspecting the eland herd and eventually stopping next to the dry riverbed, under some huge apple leaf and leadwood trees, for brunch. James was always very sceptical about my Swannie braai, a device I used to braai boerewors in flames fuelled by newspaper.

  The girls had rolls, cheese, tomato and lettuce at hand, as well as icy cold beers and soft drinks in the Coleman cooler.

  We had our brunch at ten in the morning and decided to take the scenic route via Messina and Louis Trichardt back to Polokwane.

  Halfway between the farm and Messina was Mapungubwe National Park and World Heritage Site. The park was formally opened in 2004, after a long battle which was started by Jan Smuts in 1922.

  He was the prime minister of South Africa at that time and, like Paul Kruger, also wanted to be remembered as the creator of a few national parks. He was an avid botanist and he called this park the Dongola Botanical Reserve.

  Unfortunately for General Smuts, his dreams of a reserve soon lay shattered, due to the political climate in South Africa, after the Boer War and the First World War.

  In my early days in the South African Defence Force, Mapungubwe, or Vhembe, as it was known then, was used as a military base. The military base was erected in 1968, on a hill where the Shashi River joined the Limpopo River, as this was the border between South Africa, Botswana and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and was a strategic military zone.

  I did survival courses while in the Defence Force, on another military base, Modimbo, which was situated a hundred odd kilometres further to the east.

  One day I was called upon to act as a guide to one of the ministers on a hunting trip at Vhembe. That was the first of many hunting trips with top brass and senior politicians at Mapungubwe.

  I knew the area fairly well and was curious about what the park looked like nowadays, as I hadn’t been there since the 1980s. I decided to show the area to Karlien and the girls, and to tell them some of my tales from years ago.

  We drove through the park and were lucky enough to see, besides the normal antelopes, some elephants, rhinos, buffaloes and wild dogs.

  The old military camp had been demolished and the National Parks Board was in the process of building new tourist facilities. Some rest camps were already in place as well as game viewing hides and a museum.

  We left the park two hours later and drove through Louis Trichardt just after three in the afternoon and, as it was still early, I decided to stop at the Lalapanzi Hotel for coffee and cake, and also to show the girls the little Anglo Boer War museum on the premises.

  They had heard many stories about the war, and the area around Louis Trichardt was riddled with Anglo Boer War sites.

  We left at five, after a guided tour by the owner, and made it back to Polokwane just before dark. A very busy weekend and just what I needed to get my head cleared again.

  ***

  Ons Hoop Hostel, Pietersburg High School

  Danielle Coetzee was lying on her bed in her room at the hostel, hugging a giant pink bear. Her father won it for her at a travelling carnival five years ago. She begged him to take her to the carnival to ride on the Ferris wheel. On the way to the ticket office, one of the vendors convinced him to shoot at a small star for a prize. The big prize was the giant bear and, after Tom shot out the paper star, the prize was handed over. Danielle staggered under the weight, refusing to allow her father to carry the bear and refusing to let go. They even had to buy the bear a ticket for the ride on the Ferris wheel.

  Her father had dropped her off just before six, in time for a quick change of clothes to go to church with the rest of her mates.

  They had their supper afterwards and lights out was scheduled for ten o’clock.

  She lay on her bed thinking about their weekend on the farm.

  Her visit to Dirkie was a bit of an anticlimax. Wher
e they used to joke around and gossip about the other pupils or teachers at school, Dirkie was in a sombre mood. He was very glum and only answered straight questions. She could see that he was a bit ashamed of what had happened to him, but that there was also an inner fury that he tried to hide from her.

  He was not the Dirkie of a month before. Her visit to him only lasted for two hours, after which she decided to rather spend more valuable time at home with her aunt.

  Her aunt was something else as well. The death of Selina was news to her, and she was quite shocked that a snake could kill someone that fast. She had encountered many snakes in her life on the farm but was never afraid of them. She used to ignore them, and never had an incident with one. Now she was scared of them.

  She asked her father about the snake incident, and he replied that it was a freak accident. Freak or no freak, she was still scared.

  Her father had started painting again, and to her that was very comforting. Such a lot of weird things happened in the last month; she needed something normal to happen again.

  Oom Jan that was killed and Kwinzee that was almost killed in the car bomb. What was happening to her family? And then the silly Dirkie who tried to be Rambo and solve the problem!

  Her father painted and took them to his farm and Mapungubwe. She enjoyed it very much and was sure Tannie Karlien also liked it a lot.

  She thought about her Appel goat stud.

  The Appel goat stud was her responsibility and there was a lot of correspondence about a small livestock exhibition and auction at the end of May, at the Pretoria Show Grounds.

  Her dad told her that it would be a good idea for her to exhibit at the show.

  She had to select five ewes and two rams, to be groomed for the exhibition, and was planning on selling them at the auction afterwards.

  Her dad told her to sell the same goats on the auction that she exhibited at the show. In that way, she would build a good name in the industry, and would attract buyers in future.