I had photographed much mayhem in Thokoza, but I had not been aware that I knew someone who had lost a loved one there. To find out that one of those many ‘violence-related incidents’ had happened to the woman who cleaned my house every Monday was disconcerting. Joyce’s granddaughter, Mimi, had lived on the very edge of that dead zone in Thokoza, in Nkaka Street. Just days before her death in August of 1991, Mimi had called Joyce to ask if she could come and stay with her in Soweto, some 30 kilometres away, as parts of the giant township were still untouched by the violence that had completely engulfed Thokoza. Joyce was delighted. Mimi was her only granddaughter and the apple of her eye, and she longed to see her again. The child had stayed with her from the age of one until she was four, while Mimi’s mother had looked for a place to stay, eventually finding a backyard shack in Thokoza. From then on, the child came regularly to stay with Joyce. Besides the ever-present threat of political violence, Mimi, just 13, was terrified of being jackrolled - the practice of certain criminal gangs of abducting and gang-raping girls for days at a stretch.
One such gang of thugs was the Bad Boys, a gang in Slovo section. They were small-time tsotsis, who had become increasingly brazen and dangerous in the now nearly-lawless township. They progressed from petty theft, mugging and burglary to armed robbery and hijacking vehicles at gun-point. One day in 1990, they had tried to rob the driver of a truck delivering milk to a neighbourhood store, owned by a Zulu businessman and founder of a small Zionist Christian sect, Bishop Mbhekiseni Khumalo. The bishop ran out of his store with the handgun he had bought especially for thugs like the Bad Boys, and fired at the fleeing tsotsis. One of the shots hit a woman in the street, killing her. The Bishop claimed that the Bad Boys had killed her, but there were many eyewitnesses to the shooting. He remained unrepentant and grew increasingly belligerent, making the neighbourhood turn against him. The incident had happened at the time, in July 1990, when Inkatha, having changed into a political party, had begun a recruitment drive. The Bishop, a Zulu, asked for Inkatha’s protection in return for promoting membership in his area. The Bishop and his new henchmen - well-armed and blooded veterans of the political conflict in KwaZulu-Natal - became known as the Khumalo Gang, and led a campaign of terror to force people to join Inkatha or leave the area. In the prevailing atmosphere, audacious groups, like the Khumalo Gang, planned and committed assassinations of opponents with impunity and ran their territories like fiefdoms, exploiting the traumatized community even further. The Bad Boys themselves were quick to take advantage of the anarchy, and jackrolling was their pastime. If the gangster saw a girl they desired, they would wait for her to come out of school, or even take her right out of her home. They would keep the girl at their hideout and repeatedly gang-rape her until they grew bored - which might take a day or a week. They would then drop her back home, telling her parents that they had enjoyed their daughter and would come back for her some time.
One day, when Joyce returned home from work to her own backyard shack in Soweto, she found her niece waiting for her, looking very disturbed. Joyce grew nervous, guessing there was bad news. When she heard that Mimi had been killed, Joyce began screaming to drown out the words.
Joyce decided to go to Thokoza immediately, even though it was getting dark and there were very few minibus taxis around. She had to use a series of taxis to get to Thokoza. Once there, it was difficult to get one to take her all the way to the place where Mimi lived because the taxis stopped travelling by six in the evening. She found a taxi and pleaded with the driver to take her, explaining the situation. He reluctantly agreed to go as far as Natalspruit Hospital at the top end of Khumalo Street, but no further. Taxis belonged to associations clearly affiliated to either Inkatha or the ANC and the driver would have had to drive through Inkatha territory to take her to her destination. She was now stranded over two kilometres from the house and the streets were eerily empty. People were too scared to be out after dark, so Joyce began to walk, both fearful of what she would find and of her own safety as she stealthily hurried along the dark streets that passed through the dead zone. She finally reached the darkened house, where Mimi’s mother Eunice and her surviving daughter had joined the landlady in hiding for fear of a further visit from the gangsters. In the gloom, Joyce heard how her granddaughter had been killed.
Mimi had been sick in bed with the ’flu and, at about eight o’clock that evening, Eunice sent her elder daughter to the shop to buy a tin of soup, because that was all the sick child would eat. On the way back she passed a gang of thugs that she recognized as members of the Bad Boys gang. They called out to her, telling her to come to them. The girl decided to make a run for it as she was close to home. They chased her but she made it home ahead of them and slammed the shack door shut behind her. Her mother was watching television with the landlady in the main house, unaware of what was happening in the backyard. The boys banged on the door, saying, ‘She is our girlfriend, we want our girlfriend; she is running away from us.’
The terrified girl hid behind the door and yelled back that she was not their girlfriend. The sound of the Bad Boys trying to break down the door woke Mimi. In her feverish, confused state, she jumped out of bed and ran into the other room of the shack, away from the door. But the thugs had come around to the window and as they broke the glass, Mimi called out to her sister, ‘Sisi, what’s going ...?’ They shot her behind the ear, the bullet coming out through her mouth. The tsotsis climbed in through the window, ignored the young girl they had just shot, and took Mimi’s screaming sister away. On the way back to their hideout, they abducted another girl from a nearby house. The girls were locked in a shack, while their captors began smoking dagga (marijuana) and drinking, getting primed for the party in which the girls would be raped. They were not in a hurry, they knew that they could keep the girls as long as they wished - the police would do nothing. At one stage, late in the night, the stoned gangsters lost concentration, and the girls seized the chance to escape.
Joyce listened to the story with growing horror and disbelief. She did not want to accept that her grandchild was dead, but as the oldest in the family, she was obliged the next day to go identify Mimi’s corpse at the government mortuary. When the mortuary attendant pulled out the drawer that contained Mimi, Joyce nearly fainted. She was naked and her one eye was hanging out of its socket. But Joyce steeled herself and examined her closely. Mimi’s hair was like it always was, blow-dried back - the tight curls fashionably relaxed, so that her hair was long and straight. The young girl’s breasts seemed surprisingly small - she had always had a large bust that Joyce used to playfully tease her about. Joyce was puzzled, did a person’s breasts shrink after they died? She was overcome by the thought that she wouldn’t see Mimi alive again.
That night, Joyce went back to Soweto. She slept uneasily and dreamt of Mimi. In the dream, Mimi hugged her as she did in life - coming up behind her grandmother and throwing her arms around her, her breasts pressing against Joyce’s back. Joyce said to her, ‘Take off your big breasts for me.’ Mimi just laughed, but Joyce insisted, asking why her breasts had been so small at the mortuary, but now they were once again their normal size. Mimi pulled away from her. Joyce turned and saw from the child’s face that she was upset. Mimi walked out of the shack and down to the street, without looking back, and then Joyce woke up. She could not get back to sleep and, in the morning, she told her daughter Tamara about the dream. Tamara reassured her that it was just a dream, that it meant nothing. But Joyce was deeply troubled, not just by the death, but by the idea that something unnatural had been visited on Mimi. She told her sister about the dream, who insisted they visit a traditional spirit medium, a sangoma, to see if anything supernatural had occurred. They asked around and were directed to a young sangoma. He put on his animal skin cloak to speak to his ancestors, and then he asked Joyce if she had come to see him about a female. Joyce said, ‘Yes.’ He asked if the person had been shot, and they believed her to be dead. Joyce said that this was true. The sa
ngoma told them that she was not dead. ‘She is alive. She is being kept where she used to live.’ He said that she was a zombie and described the zombie’s mistress. To Joyce, the sangoma’s description fitted that of Mimi’s middle-aged landlady. Joyce and her sister paid and left. They wanted to be sure, so they went to two more sangomas, both of whom told them the same thing. For Joyce, it was a glimmer of hope - if Mimi was not dead, but a zombie, then a powerful sangoma could free her from the curse and return Mimi to her.
Ten days later, Joyce returned to Thokoza for the funeral. She had to dress Mimi’s body. She had brought a pair of panties and a new T-shirt, but she was shaking badly when she approached the body. This time the body seemed different. Mimi’s breasts were soft, as if they were an old woman’s, and her torso was limp, but when Joyce pulled the panties on, she was surprised that from the waist down, her body was as hard as iron. The girl’s hair had been cut short, but it looked as if it was growing. Joyce began wondering why her hair was so short, why the breasts were like that, and why she was not completely stiff like a dead person should be? Her suspicions that Mimi was not really dead were strengthened.
After the church service, the schoolchildren proceeded to the graveyard on foot. They sang, ‘Mimi, we loved you. Mimi, we loved you,’ as they danced the militant toyi-toyi all the way to the cemetery. It was a large funeral with two bishops, three priests and several church choirs at the graveside. Joyce thought it was wonderful, except that it hurt so much because it was Mimi who was being buried.
The following day, Joyce and the family had to perform the traditional cleaning that follows a death - washing the blankets, linen and clothes of everyone in the house. Joyce returned to Soweto and went to see sangomas again, but different ones each time. It was unsettling and frightening, because they told her the same thing, all of them. They said that Mimi was working for the landlady, running her shebeen for her. Joyce was by now utterly convinced that Mimi was a zombie.
A week later, her Soweto neighbour ran over and told Joyce to switch on the radio, to listen to what was happening in Thokoza. The schoolchildren had caught up with one of the killers. They had tortured him until he gave up the names and whereabouts of the other Bad Boys who had taken part in Mimi’s killing. The children hunted them all down, and then stoned and burned them to death. But revenge did nothing to assuage the pain and anguish Joyce felt: she continued to dream of her granddaughter. In one recurrent dream, Mimi asked Joyce to come and fetch her because she could not escape by herself. But when Joyce asked her where she was being held, Mimi would just point, then vanish.
Joyce never accused the landlady of making Mimi into a zombie - she had no proof. Her only hope was to find a sangoma who could break the spell Mimi was under, who could exert enough supernatural power to free Mimi from her captor’s sorcery. She spent much of her scarce savings on charlatans who said they could help, but without success. I came to understand the zombie business as Joyce’s way of clinging to hope. If she forsook the possibility that Mimi was not really dead, then she would have to face the fact that her grandchild was never coming home again. But Joyce’s continued hope that one day her beloved Mimi would return masked a deep despair: ‘I know nothing about zombies, honestly. People say that they exist for a long time, until God takes them. Then they die.’
Sometimes I would grow angry with her, hearing of yet another experience of wasted money and dashed expectations. But I came to see that I was wrong, and rather than trying to divert Joyce from her superstition, I learnt that everyone has their own way of dealing with trauma. Joyce’s belief that Mimi was not really dead was not so different from my own belief that God would spare my mother from cancer.
9
INTELEZI
Death is natural
You are welcome to this funeral
Traditional Acholi funeral song
The constant exposure to war began to get to us. During one of the brief periods of calm following the Boipatong massacre, Joao and Kevin were at Joao’s flat smoking dagga and sharing a bottle of bourbon. Joao fumbled to construct a joint. Viv was pretending to be asleep - she was sick of the men and did not want to be included in their drunken talk. The conversation turned to women, relationships and emotional need. Joao was being hardcore: ‘I don’t need anyone.’ (Viv would confront him the next morning about being such an arsehole, and he would contritely apologize.)
Joao was still struggling with the joint and then dropped all of the dagga on to the floor. Joao was taken aback as Kevin got down on to his hands and knees, and began to lick the palm of his hand to pick up as much of the dagga as possible. Joao and Viv had four cats living inside the flat and the thought of smoking the fallen dope disgusted him. Joao threw Kevin the bag of dagga, ‘Fuck that, here’s more. That shit will be full of cat hair.’ Kevin looked at him strangely and said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like being an addict and not having!’
As they shared the cat-hair joint, their conversation moved on. Joao was adamant that there was a price to be paid for the pictures we took. This was something we hardly ever discussed. Kevin was having none of it and he was getting annoyed: ‘Retribution? In order to have retribution there has to be a sin!’ ‘There has to be retribution for the things we sometimes do!’ Joao persisted. ‘Are you saying what we do is a sin?’ Kevin asked.
Joao could not answer, but he felt that there had to be some form of retribution for watching people kill each other through our viewfinders when all we did was take pictures.
That night was the first time that Kevin had admitted to having an addiction to buttons and needing, not just choosing, drugs. Button-smokers crush a Mandrax tablet, a banned tranquillizer, and then mix it with dagga before stuffing it into a broken-off bottle neck. This so-called white pipe produces a powerful rush, often causing the smoker to keel over, before sinking into a couple of hours of sedated calm. Mandrax is not an elegant drug; button-kops (button-heads) share a communal spittoon into which they slobber, spit up phlegm and sometimes vomit.
Kevin was, however, paradoxically affected by Madrax. Instead of the usual mellow downer most people experienced, he got a jolt of energy. He would become all fired up with ideas and emotions. That was one of the reasons why Joao and I never realized the extent of his addiction-I always assumed that he could not be doing buttons when he was so hyper. One day in 1993, Joao went around to Kevin’s place. He knocked on the door for a while, but no one answered. He could hear loud music, so he knew that Kevin had to be in. Kevin finally opened the door and Joao was shocked to see that he was bleeding profusely from a cut above his eye. Kevin told him how he had been in Alexandra township and had gone down on one knee to take pictures when a young comrade had come running past and kicked him in the face. The hard edges of the camera had cut him above the eyebrow.
Joao followed Kevin to the backyard where he found a friend of Kevin’s, Reedwaan, holding a white pipe, and struggling to keep his balance. Joao grew a little suspicious - the wound seemed fresh and he could see that Kevin and Reedwaan were swaying all over the place. They offered Joao a bust on the pipe; he refused and left. Years later Joao found a roll of black-and-white film of pictures of Kevin in his backyard posing with boxing gloves and the blood from a cut above his eye running down the bridge of his nose. When we asked Reedwaan, he admitted that the story Kevin had told Joao and the rest of us about the Alex incident had been concocted. Kevin had cut himself by falling into a rosebush in the yard after he had bust a pipe and the rush hit him. Most button-smokers sit down while smoking and let themselves keel over when the drug takes effect, but Kevin would inexplicably stand up and then fall over. This habit irritated Reedwaan because it interfered with his own high - he always had to keep an eye on Kevin. On a couple of occasions Kevin had nearly gone over a balcony while rushing.
By late 1992, Kevin was fast approaching burn-out and we all were pretty strung out. He eased off covering the violence and took up being a late-night disc-jockey part-time. If I was awake at
midnight, I would listen to him. He had a good radio voice - warm and rich; sometimes he would say something to us over the air between songs. While he did not leave news-photography altogether, he joined us on fewer dawn patrols - hardly surprising since his radio show ended at five in the morning. Ken had also eased off on the morning cruising, leaving Joao and me to do it alone much of the time. Ken’s life was pretty taken up with his work in the photo department at The Star, and his marriage to Monica was an intense, claustrophobic affair that naturally excluded the rest of us. But he would sometimes tell us stories of times when their emotions went way over the edge. On one occasion, Ken was on his way to shoot a boxing match in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, an hour-and-a-half drive from Johannesburg. Monica called him and said she wanted him back, I forget the details of why, but she told him that she was going to start tearing up his pictures one by one until he got back. Ken knew she was capable of it and immediately turned around and returned home. In another much-told Ken and Monica incident: they were having a fight that became nasty. In a rage, Monica began to burn a pile of cash that was in a fruit bowl in the dining-room. Ken had been saving up for an expensive leather jacket and there was a lot of money in the bowl. Crazy as it was of Monica to burn the banknotes, I found it even stranger that Ken apparently made no attempt to stop her. We heard other stories in a similar vein, of broken plates and record collections. Their fights became legendary and whenever they invited any of us over for dinner or a birthday party we never quite knew how the evening would end.
The Bang-Bang Club Page 12