In the front of the volume, Kagiso finds his name:
Mayoyo.
In a list of ‘Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights’.
He shudders. Seeing his own name in print, there, in black and white, in the directory of national horrors, the feeling rises, like when he saw the new gravestone his grandmother had had erected on his grandfather’s grave, the first time he had associated his name – there, carved in stone – with death, the first indication of his mortality passing through him like a cold wind. The feeling rises, as in DC, when he glimpsed his reflection looking back at him from behind the names of the gratuitously dead in the polished surface of the memorial to the vainglorious Vietnam War. Angered by the audacity, he had turned around and walked away. But now he doesn’t close the volume; rather, he lies down on his back and brings its weight down onto his chest.
When he wakes, his head beside the volumes, his eyes move over the open pages:
It was not a secret march – it was in the newspapers. I remember on the 24th or the 25th Dr Boesak was still negotiating with Mr Le Grange, then Minister of Police. He sent him a telegram to say that this march would be peaceful and, to a large extent, was a symbolic march. There was no idea that we would physically go into Pollsmoor prison and break Mr Mandela out.
A breeze flows through the open window and flips a few pages.
Lionel and Quentin were 13-year-olds and they both died. There were thousands of people, but why did the police shoot the children? Karel sat with Lionel while he was dying – now Karel is suffering because he and his brother where like twins.
Now a strong gust throws open the window. It startles him. He leaps across the small room to secure the banging pane. When he returns to the volume, he finds it open on a book-marked page. His eyes seize the heading “‘Trojan Horse’ killings”. The words stand up like Lazarus in front of him. They don’t resurrect mythological images; those have been usurped. His association, vivid, is from his youth.
Shock waves from the ambush reverberated around the country and beyond. After the attack, Athlone, at the epicentre, dropped its hands from its shell-shocked ears and looked around in dazed confusion. Then, as if in slow motion, it saw three of its boys fall to the ground, dead. The angry, speechless wave that had lapped at hearts for centuries, rose again, each time a little higher than before. In its rising it woke mythology from its age-old slumber, took its language, then sent it back to sleep.
The Trojan Horse and other ambush tactics 168 The Athlone ‘Trojan Horse’ incident that took place in Athlone, Cape Town, on 15 October 1985 is well known: police hiding in large wooden crates on the back of a railway truck fired directly into a crowd of about a hundred people who had gathered around a Thornton Road intersection, killing Michael Cheslyn Miranda (11) [CT00478, CT00472], Shaun Magmoed (16) [CT00472] and Mr Jonathan Claasen (21) [CT00475] and injuring several others.
That night, while Cape Town of the Flats mourned its dead and young, galvanised hearts readied themselves for battle, in Johannesburg Issa lifted a rucksack onto his back and made for the front door, determined to defy Ma Vasinthe if it came to that:
“You can’t go to Cape Town! she asserted, barring the doorway. “What about school?”
School? I’m sorry, Ma, but if you mean that bigoted white liberal bourgeois nest you send us to every day, you can forget it.
Outside a convoy of expensive combis hooted, clenched fists and Palestinian kefiyas and V-fingers raised into the air through narrowly opened tinted windows.
Let me pass, Ma.
“No.” She folded her arms.
Ma. Please. Get out of the way.
“Now you listen to me!” she commanded, waving a stern finger at him. “You’re a child and you will do as I say.”
Yes, Ma. I am a child. And if that makes me a legitimate target in this country then it makes me a legitimate protestor too. Now get out of my way!
“Don’t you shout at me, young man.”
Issa lowered his voice. He glared at his mother from under a furrowed brow. Ma, I’d rather leave the house with your blessing, but if –
Vasinthe dug her heels in. “I’m not negotiating with you.”
Hoot hoot.
Suit yourself. Issa swung around and started running towards the back door.
“Gloria!” Vasinthe yelled. “Lock the back door!”
But Gloria did not obey. When Issa rushed through the kitchen, she looked up from the ironing. Issa paused. They exchanged glances, did not speak. A snatched wordless moment in which they understood each other perfectly.
When Vasinthe entered the room, Gloria said goodbye by glancing at the open door.
Then Kagiso was drafted in. “Go!” Vasinthe shouted, pointing up the driveway. “Stop him!”
Kagiso leapt into action and caught up with Issa at the gate. He grabbed onto the rucksack and started tugging and pulling at it.
Let me go! Issa struggled.
“Hold on to him, Kagiso. I’m coming.”
One of the gleaming combis pulled up to the curve. A door slid open.
“Come, Issa!” a voice called out from the dark, shaded interior. “Drop the bag!”
Issa dumped his restraining baggage and leapt into the combi.
Go! he shouted, when he hit the floor, his legs still dangling through the door.
On the pavement, Ma Vasinthe watched as her son was carried away in an expensive motorcade of defiant resistance. As the convoy picked up speed, she saw V-fingers, kefiyas, Issa’s dangling legs vanish from sight as tinted windows were sealed and solid doors slid shut. When the discreet, blacked-out fleet disappeared around the corner, Kagiso stepped forward to pick up the jettisoned rucksack.
The day after the Trojan Horse shooting, an angry crowd gathered at the St Athans Road Mosque in Athlone. A member of the SAP was shot by the crowd, after which police opened fire, killing Mr Abdul Fridie (29) [CT00607]. On 18th October, a massive security force presence was moved into Athlone.
Armed soldiers and police lined the streets and searched houses while a helicopter hovered above.
When Kagiso replaces the bookmark, he notices a quotation on its reverse side:
And why should ye not
Fight in the cause of God
And of those who, being weak,
Are ill-treated (and oppressed)? –
Men, women, and children,
Whose cry is: “Our Lord!
Rescue us from this town,
Whose people are oppressors;
And raise for us from Thee
One who will protect;
And raise for us from Thee
One who will help!”
Qur’n S.iv.75
The Monster’s Name
WHEN VASINTHE TRAVELLED TO London immediately after Issa’s disappearance, she brought two gifts, one of them a photograph of her and Issa, which now stands on Katinka’s bedside table next to a picture of Karim. Katinka enacts a little ritual here everyday, laying a flower, sometimes just a leaf plucked in passing from a tree, or tilting perfume onto her forefinger then touching it to the frames – her altar to her missing men. At night she always lights the tea light beside it before she goes to bed.
About the picture, she remembers everything – how she had insisted they have it taken, the warmth of the night, the feeling of his strong shoulders under her hand as she pulled him towards her following the hand signals of the obliging stranger to whom she’d given her camera – the date, 11th February 1990. Her words to Issa...
“I want to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter that I hardly know you. I want to tell it to somebody tonight, now, and then never have to talk about it again.”
The previous day, Kagiso had insisted that they give the stranded girl a lift. “Bloody hell, Issa, she could be standing there for hours in this heat.”
Are you mad?
“But that guy’s just dumped her on the side of the road.”
I’m not getting involved in their argumen
t. He’ll turn back for her. He pays the petrol attendant.
“I don’t think so. He looked pretty angry to me.”
Kagiso looks at the abandoned girl. She kicks her rucksack in frustration then, raising a shielding palm to her brow, turns to salute the shimmering horizon. Issa starts the engine and drives slowly out of the forecourt. When they join the main road, he accelerates.
“Issa?”
Forget it!
But Kagiso pulls up the handbrake bringing the car to a screeching stop just beyond where the girl is standing. She runs towards them.
“Cape Town?”
“Yes,” says Kagiso, throwing open the back door. “Jump in.”
“Thank you very much.”
When she has settled down, Kagiso turns around. “What was that all about?”
The girls sighs despondently. “In this country, what else? Fucking racist doos.”
Issa glances at her through the rear view mirror.
“He picked me up outside Bloemfontein. It wasn’t long before I regretted ever getting into his car. But I was glad to have the lift so I just listened. But after two hours of his kak, I just couldn’t keep quiet any more. So I told him why I was going to Cape Town. That’s when he threw me out.”
“Heavy.”
“Ja well, I’ve seen worse. Thanks for stopping. For a moment I thought I might miss it all.”
“That’s all right,” Kagiso says, not looking at Issa.
“You also going down for the occasion?” the girl asks.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t wait.”
“I’m sure he can’t either.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
She notices a packet of Rizla papers among the paraphernalia on the dashboard. “You guys mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead,” Kagiso says. “There’s an ashtray in the door.” He leans over the seat to show her.
“Woah!” he exclaims when he sees the fat hand-rolled affair cocked in her fingers. “That thing looks dangerous. Is it what I think it is?”
“Do you mind? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Do I mind? Go ahead, please.” He ignites a lighter. “I smoked my last at a party last night.”
“In that case, you should go first.” She holds out her offering.
“Thanks, man.”
“Transvaal plates,” she comments. “Jo’urg?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Ventersdorp.”
Issa tightens his grip on the wheel.
“Right.” Kagiso says, then holds out the joint.
“Kolskoot!” She exclaims. “That’s exactly it. Ventersdorp in a word.” She takes the joint. “Actually, for an even better summation of my home town, you need to prefix ‘right’ with ‘far’, or better still, ‘ultra’. You get what I’m saying?”
Kagiso nods with wide stretched eyes. “That bad?”
“That bad,” she raises the joint but stops short of her lips. “And my problem with it, to start with, you see,” she says, screwing her eyes to shield them from the smoke, “is that I’m wired differently. As you may have noticed, I’m a left-handed nooi.” She raises the illicit contents of her left hand into the air, “Cheers,” and then brings it to her lips.
“I’m Katinka, by the way,” she says when the music stops.
“And I’m Kagiso. He’s Issa.”
“And does Issa speak?”
“Not very often.”
She nods. “I see.”
“When you guys going back to Jo’urg?”
“Not for a while now. December probably. Maybe June. We study in Cape Town.”
“You’re lucky. I would have loved to study in Cape Town, under the mountains, next to the sea, but,” she sighs, “it wasn’t meant to be.”
“What happened?”
“My father – that’s what happened. He wouldn’t hear about it.”
“Why? ”
“He wouldn’t hear of his daughter going to university in liberal Cape Town. I tried to bargain. ‘Stellenbosch,’ I said, but he had made up his mind and when my father has made up his mind, it’s because his pal, God, has had a say in the decision. So to change it again would be a sin.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to Free State. What else could I do? It was that or stay on the farm. But,” she says with a relieved sigh, as though dropping an unbearable weight, “I’ve finished my course and all that is behind me.” Then she sits forward, squeezing herself between the two front seats to point at the endless open road stretched out in front of them, “and that’s what lies ahead.”
She opens the book on the back seat:
...we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.
But at last Dahoun drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. “This,” they told me, “is the best: it has no taste.” My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
She glances at their silent driver and lays down the book, her fingers brushing the tattered flag pictured on the cover. “What is this music?” she asks of the lilting, sorrowful tune.
“It’s his.”
“What is this music?” she repeats. “I’ve never heard such music. Where’s it from?”
He says his first words to her. It’s –
She is surprised. “But that’s banned.”
Issa doesn’t respond.
“Well, it is beautiful music. Like the desert. Like here.”
It is night by the time they approach the mountains that encircle Cape Town. Scatterings of light betray the sleepy villages in the dark valleys below them, while the golden glow of the city beyond hangs over the peaks above, like a halo.
“I’ve not yet seen the new tunnel. I’m told it’s quite impressive.”
Kagiso looks at Issa.
“I believe they built it from both sides of the mountain. Apparently, when the two tunnels met, they were only millimetres off.”
It’s getting late and he has been driving for sixteen hours. Tomorrow will be another long day. At the fork in the motorway, the moment of choice between the tunnel and the pass, Issa makes for the tunnel.
Minutes later, they are racing down the N1 on the home run to its southernmost destination. To their left, the Cape Flats – a carpet of light stretching all the way to False Bay, glides by. Ahead, a sweeping bend brings Table Mountain slowly into the view, lit up against the night sky. There is an air of anticipation in the city.
At last the sun has set.
Dawn will usher in a long-awaited new era.
And steering the car between the flashing white lines on the freeway, a quote comes to hover in front of Issa’s tired, driving eyes: “The morning freshness of the world to be intoxicated us.” That is all he wishes to remember of it and tries hard to ignore the rest of it. But the passage lingers, demanding to be recalled in its entirety: “yet, when we achieved and a new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”
“I wonder what he must be feeling now,” she says, almost to herself.
The next night, when the crowd on the Grand Parade starts
to disperse, they walk across town to the Underground. Inside, the atmosphere is euphoric. Issa’s entrance is greeted with hoots and cheers.
“Amandla!”
“Awethu!”
“It is true, isn’t it?”
“It’s true.”
Katinka is greeted with cautious reserve.
“Ek sê my bra,” Issa’s friend starts up when they are alone, “leading the way to reconciliation by example, or what? Who’s the lanie nooi?”
Issa looks across the room to where Katinka has blended effortlessly into the celebrations. He felt called upon to deliver his verdict, his final interpretation of the bits of evidence she had laid before him during the course of the day. As he watched her dance, rejoice, hands high in the air, it came to him: The system imprisoned all of us.
He turned to his friend: She’s a comrade from the Free State. So don’t you give her grief.
“Nooit, my bra. If she’s with you, I knew she had to be cool.”
Coolest you’ll meet.
“Vir seker!” his friend nods with envious admiration.
From the crowded dance floor, Katinka catches Issa’s outline, crouching in a dark corner, his neck crooked as he stares into the space above her head. She follows his gaze to the ceiling above the dance floor. Being projected there, are images of the day’s unimaginable events: the huge crowd that gathered outside the prison to greet him, waiting, for hours; the moment when he appeared, actually appeared, there, in front of them, walking into their midst, like the Messiah; the hush that fell, then the rising murmurs, the grappling with the most indescribable complexity of emotion, all of it, pent up, with him, for 27 years; then, the release, the catharsis, the ecstatic jubilation, here, in the city, across the country and around the world.
“Amandla!” someone shouts from the dance floor.
The whole Underground responds with a deafening chorus, which overpowers the thumping sound system: “Awethu!”
The sequence ends with the face of the man as he now is, emerging, slowly, from behind the blacked-out profile of his banned image – till today, apart from a few black and white images that predated his censure, the only image their generation had of him.
Silent Minaret Page 9