Silent Minaret

by Shukri, Ishtiyaq

  Kagiso picks up the album cover while he thinks of something to say. On it, a pyramid refracts a single beam of white light into a rainbow of colour. “Nice cover,” he says, laying it down.

  Brilliant album. Want to hear it?

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Here, hold this. Issa gives him the joint, takes the vinyl record from the sleeve and walks over to the turntable.

  Kagiso holds the joint in his hand, its thick, pungent smoke, swirling in front of him like a charmer’s snake.

  Issa turns around and, with outstretched arms, starts to sing to him:

  Breathe, breathe in the air

  Don’t be afraid to care

  Leave but don’t leave me

  Look around and choose your own ground

  For long you live and high you fly

  And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry

  And all you’ll touch and all you’ll see

  Is all your life will ever be

  Issa flops back onto the bed. Before handing him back the joint, Kagiso brings it to his lips and inhales.

  The Last Night

  KATINKA IS IN BAGHDAD CAFÉ, drinking mint tea, smoking shisha. She has driven here from Heathrow, taking the M4 back into central London, driving against the flight path on her right, a queue of planes waiting to land hangs for miles into the distance. On the dreaded elevated section of the motorway, as she approached the top of the steeple, the bulk of the church out of view below, she tightened her grip on the wheel and divided her concentration between the stream of traffic in front and behind, the lorry passing on her right, the steeple-marked edge on her left; whenever she hears the expression ‘going over the edge’, it is this short, congested strip of elevated motorway that always come to mind. When the traffic came to a halt with the approach to the Hogarth Roundabout, she released her grip, stretched her fingers and lit a cigarette. She continued east along the Great West Road, through Hammersmith, Kensington, Knightsbridge. At Hyde Park Corner, she turned left and headed up Park Lane towards Marble Arch. That was when she heard the boisterous singing coming from Hyde Park:

  ...The nations not so blest as thee,

  Shall in their turns to tyrants fall;

  While thou shalt flourish great and free,

  The dread and envy of them all...

  She can’t think of a time when she didn’t know the anthem; like Die Stem, it has been there all her life, all her history, relishing exclusion, celebrating subjugation. The tune sparks tangential, flash-by memories; a dislike of it and a continued reverence, a persistent tenderness, for a little corner of her past which she cannot – despite the protestation, the spurning and the never-to-return walking away – bring herself to surrender:

  At school, she loathed excursions, which always included long, solemn visits to national monuments around the country –

  Die Taalmonument (the world’s only monument to a language) in Paarl, Die Vroue Monument in Bloemfontein, Die Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, Die Groote Kerk in Cape Town. She’d feigned sickness whenever one of them loomed, or deliberately ambled to school so that she would miss the bus.

  Except when the opportunity arose of a trip to Kimberley. She had just read The Diary of Anne Frank and tagged along as they visited the Mine Museum – “This is the biggest man-made hole on earth. Work here ceased on 14 August 1914, by which time 22,5 tons of excavated earth had yielded just 2 722 kilograms of diamonds” – Magersfontein – “It was in this battle that trenches were first used in modern warfare” – the McGregor Museum – “this grand building was once the residence of Cecil John Rhodes.”

  But it was at the nondescript site on Long Street, in front of the big church, that she took up her place in the front row, the Diary tightly clutched in her hand. “This is the site of the first concentration camp on earth, designed by Lord Kitchener for the imprisonment of Boer women and children during the Anglo-Boer War, the first war of the 20th century, the first modern war. A total of 26 000 women and children died in these camps. In the single month of October 1901, when the camps held 113 606 people, there were 3 156 deaths. Let’s have a minute’s silence to remember their sacrifice.”

  “Is that it?” she wanted to call out as they boarded the bus. “Come back! This place is not just about your tribe and the cruel indignity it suffered at the hands of the British. It’s not just about the hundreds of black people who, by the way, also died in the camps.

  “It’s about the world, because on this spot, on this very spot, the British initiated a system of incarceration which, fifty years later, would be refined with deadly efficiency on the other side of the world – a system of extermination in which ultimately millions would be led to their gasping gassy deaths and for which this site, this very spot, provided the blueprint, the prototype, the inspiration.

  “Don’t you see?” she wanted to plead, “Our people, the ‘Volk’, weren’t the only victims here, they were only the first.”

  ‘... To thee belongs the rural reign;

  Thy cities shall with commerce shine;

  All thine shall be the subject main,

  And every shore it circles thine...’

  Frances mutters her usual irritation as she always does at this point. It annoys her that so many reasonable people will sing along, flushing proudly, without any sense of irony or reflection, teaching their children to sing along too. Not just the blatantly supremacist, but ordinary, likeable people, informed people, liberal people. Catholics.

  “But there have to be limits, Frances,” Father Jerome once insisted. “Countries have to set limits on the number of immigrants they can accept, otherwise they’d lose their national character.”

  What was the use, Frances thought, of countering the priest? He had orthodoxy on his side. But she persisted: “And what about this country’s national character, Father. Was it lost when you and your order came here from France, or me from Ireland?”

  “Have you ever thought, Father, about what would happen if the anti-immigration bigots had their way? For instance, would the Holy Family be given asylum in Britain now on the evidence of Joseph’s bad dream?”

  The priest shut himself off with arms folded tightly across his chest.

  “I’ll tell you what would happen, Father. Next, it would be the Catholics, the Jews, the – ”

  “Well that’s just absurd,” the priest spluttered.

  “Is it, Father? Is it really? I’ve been around long enough to know that there is no end to their malice. The more you pander, the more they’ll take. With the blacks out of the way, we’ll be next, Father – you,” she said, pointing a finger at the priest, before turning it on herself, “and I. Once again, we’ll be at the bottom of the pile. Remember what that was like, Father?”

  When she decided on this route, Katinka had forgotten that this year, for the first time, the last concert of the season is being relayed to Hyde Park from the Royal Albert Hall up the road. This anthem means it must be nearing its end. She doesn’t want to get caught up in the flag-waving crowd when it leaves the park, so she increases her speed up Park Lane.

  ‘... Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame,

  All their attempts to bend thee down

  Will but arouse thy generous flame;

  But work their woe, and thy renown...’

  She recalls the moment when the old flag came down on the old country – to her, a sublime, ‘at last’ moment, everybody suspended between the eternity that had passed and promise of what was yet to come. She looked at the expectant faces around her, unknown faces in a sea of faces that had gathered on the Grand Parade, the very spot where once a castle, without consultation, had been built. Three hundred and forty-two years, she counted, finally draw to a close – wrong years, dark years, evil years, driven by the philosophy behind songs like these, all of them now, finally, behind. She felt the uniformed, straight lined, saluting little girl she once was step out of line, throw off her badges and run towards this stateless moment: no flag to wave
, no anthem to echo, no eternal enemy against which to perpetually defend, no God-chosen nation for which to die in gory glory. She looked up at the empty flagpole, the muted brass band, not wanting the stateless moment to end. If she had to spend an eternity anywhere, it would be right here, now, in this moment.

  In the park, the bellicose crowd has started the final verse. Katinka turns up the volume on her stereo to try and shut out the sound: ‘So here’s a toast to all the folks that live in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, El Salvador / Here’s a toast to all the folks living on the Pine Ridge Reservation under the stone cold gaze of Mount Rushmore...’

  But her sound system cannot compete with the patriots now in full swing. Even when she has rolled up the windows, she can still hear the final chorus:

  ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rules -’

  Frances switches off the TV. The flags, she thinks, seem to grow more numerous every year, the singing more triumphalist. And this year, after everything that has happened. She shakes her head. The arrogance of it all, the hankering. The embarrassing self-deception.

  She steps out into the night and settles into the driver’s seat. Not many more of these remain, she thinks. At this time of year, she always believes that the summer will linger. It is still too much in evidence – the trees are green, the beer garden in the pub downstairs is still in use, there is laughter in the street – to imagine that in only a few weeks, everything will have changed: the evenings will start to draw in, the leaves will turn, the clocks will go back, initiating the long, dark winter months when the streets will be filled with the soulless trudge of coated bodies and booted feet. The thought makes her shudder and she quickly tries to un-think it.

  She looks up to the sky. It is a clear night.

  ‘And dost thou not see that the stars in the heavens are without number, and yet none of them but the sun and the moon are subject to eclipse.’

  It doesn’t take her very long to locate the North Star. She’s been practising with the help of the book Kagiso gave her. She can identify all the main constellations and, just to the right of the North Star and slightly above, the location of a new comer. She cannot see it, but she knows it’s there. She has even given it a name.

  It did, of course, end – the sublime, stateless moment. When the new flag was raised and the new anthem sung and thousands, millions, cheered, Katinka wiped away a tear; the moment had ended. By the time the new flag reached the top of the flagpole (where the interim quickly – just one patriotic puff, one nationalistic sniff – became the addictively permanent) the endless, limitless, possibilities of the stateless moment had already been diminished.

  The waiter delivers another pot of mint tea to her table, while the sabby with his basket of coal diligently stokes her pipe, first scraping away the burnt-out embers then replacing them with five glowing coals arranged neatly in a circle on the tobacco.

  “Shukran,” she says.

  “You speak Arabic?”

  “No,” she says, not wanting conversation.

  “How you know this word?”

  “We’re all Arabs now,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing,” she waves. “Just something a friend once said. We’re all Arabs now,” before obscuring her face with a cloud of thick, fragrant smoke.

  Closed Chapters

  ‘My appeal is ultimately directed to us all, black and white together, to close the chapter on our past and to strive together for this beautiful and blessed land as the rainbow people of God.’

  Archbishop Desmond Tutu

  ‘WE’VE GOT STARS DIRECTING OUR FATE.’ The song prompts a name – Robbie – that wakes him. The sky is changing, a familiar African dawn nudging at the horizon, the red trail of their flight path lengthening: DRC / Angola / Botswana... Home isn’t far away. In the half-light, Kagiso starts to feel his way carefully around the past, like a blind man identifying a corpse.

  The date comes to him; 22 July 1989. His nineteenth birthday. The day Issa broke his leg. And a few days later, made the courtesy call (intended, Kagiso now speculates, to throw him off the scent). Then disappeared for weeks. Turning them into strangers.

  But there was another name, Kagiso thinks. Robbie and... Candice? No.

  In December, at the end of another academic year, they set off once again on the long drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg. He recalls following the route on a map, tracing its path from its starting point at the foot of Table Mountain, as far as he could, to Alexandria.

  Memory house of the world.

  Cathy? No.

  Now the monitor in front of him traces the red path of their journey from London across the English Channel to France then Spain and across the Mediterranean to Algeria then Niger / Nigeria / Cameroon / DRC / Angola / Botswana / then South Africa.

  To celebrate his birthday that year, he’d been out with Richard and Sophie and the other bright young things from upper campus.

  The past grudgingly yields the other name – Coline!

  He removes his earphones and retrieves his satchel from the overhead compartment.

  Issa had refused to send the volumes by post or even to check them in when he flew to London. He had insisted on carrying them in his hand luggage. Kagiso, his shoulders aching under the weight of the five cumbersome, heavy volumes, had felt obliged to accord them their owner’s respect.

  He turns on his overhead reading light.

  Resurgence of public protest: the Defiance Campaign, 1989

  130 After the 1986 declaration of the state of emergency, the Peninsula experienced only isolated clashes between protestors and security forces. Of particular note were the large high-profile burials of MK operatives such as the ‘Gugulethu Seven’, Mr Ashley Kriel, Mr Robert Waterwitch and Ms Coline Williams.

  Cape Town burned.

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Steve Biko!’

  ‘Long live?’

  ‘Nelson Mandela, long live!’

  ‘We Shall Overcome!’

  ‘Liberation before?’

  ‘Education!’

  ‘The People Shall?’

  ‘Govern!’

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Matthew Goniwe!’

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Hector Pieterson!’

  ‘Viva?’

  ‘Oliver Tambo, viva!’

  ‘Long live?’

  ‘Govan Mbeki, long live!’

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Ashley Kriel!’

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Robert Waterwitch!’

  ‘We will not forget?’

  ‘Coline Williams!’

  ‘Amandla!’

  ‘Awethu!’

  ‘Senzenina...’

  The Kriel funeral in 1987, attended by thousands of mourners, was marked by uproar as police failed to stick to undertakings not to interfere in the event. Major Dolf Odendal marched into the funeral procession and attempted to seize the ANC flag off Kriel’s coffin. With such incidents sustaining the political tension, the Peninsula took the lead in spearheading public protest, defiance actions and mass action in 1989.

  The celebrations had started with a bottle of champagne at Rhodes ‘Mem’ – Sophie’s choice. “Will Izzy be joining us?” she asked.

  “Maybe later,” Kagiso said, not knowing how he would negotiate the ancient hostilities between Issa and Richard.

  “Isn’t this just lovely?” Sophie said, exhaling admiringly over the view, before passing the joint to Kagiso. “Happy Birthday, Kaggy,” she said when he took it, and kissed him cheek to cheek.

  131 The Defiance Campaign against apartheid laws was launched as a national initiative by the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), but the Western Cape was to play a leading role. By March 1989, protest actions resulting in arrests had begun in Cape Town. There followed a proliferation of defiance activities targeting a range of apartheid laws, peaking in opposition to the ‘whites-only’ election of 6 Septemb
er 1989.

  From Rhodes Memorial they drove to Sea Point, taking the longer scenic route along De Waal Drive, up over Kloof Nek, then down to Camps Bay and along the coast to the Hard Rock Cafe, spectacularly located on a rocky outcrop in the sea, waves crashing all around.

  “The Constantia, please,” Richard said emphatically when the waiter came to take their order and then, as soon as the waiter had turned, finished his sentence, “What else?”

  Now, his glass is raised in his hand. “Looks like Shamsuddin’s running late. Probably out saving the world.”

  “So that we can enjoy it! Ha ha ha.”

  “May as well get started then. Cheers! And Happy Birthday.”

  “Yes. Happy Birthday, Kaggy. Cheers.”

  Throughout dinner, Kagiso kept an expectant eye on the door.

  132 On 6 August 1989, sixteen restricted activists announced their defiance of their restriction orders at an Athlone church service, sparking off a cycle of arrests and continued defiance. On 8 August, defiance rallies were held at schools and campuses in the Peninsula, and the United Democratic Front was declared ‘unbanned’ by a mass meeting in St George’s Cathedral followed by a march under banners of banned organisations. On 12 August, restricted activists again publicly defied their restriction orders at a National Women’s Day rally in Hanover Park, which was then teargassed. Many were detained under the emergency regulations.

  As they were leaving the restaurant, Sophie pointed at a sign above the door which read: ‘Ssh. People sleep out there.’ “Cute,” she said, and lifted her leg like Marilyn Monroe.

  They walked down to the rocks where they smoked another joint. Kagiso positioned himself with a view of the parking lot.

  “Have you guys heard this one?” Richard started when he’d passed on the joint. “There was once a colony of ants whose ant heaps were being repeatedly stamped into the ground by a herd of elephants.