Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  Strickland gazed at the little figure as if it was someone famous she should be able to recognize in an instant, some household name. In fact, the features of this woman—she is wearing a skirt and doek—are no more than a grey smudge, continuous with the shadowed wall behind her.

  I looked at Hector Peterson’s left arm, floating on air, and the shadow of his hand on Mbuyisa Makhubu’s knee, a shadow so hard-edged and muscular it could trip the bearer up.

  The child is dead. With his rumpled sock around his ankle, his grazed knee, his jersey stuck with dry grass, you would think he had taken a tumble in the playground, if it were not for the gout of blood from his mouth. The jersey is a bit too big for him: it was meant to last another year at least. Or is it just that he was small for his age? Or is it the angle? In his hair is a stalk of grass shaped like a praying mantis.

  “Nobody knows.”

  Strickland sat back with a sigh, but Reddy went on relentlessly.

  “Nevertheless, theories were advanced: some people said that this woman, this apparent bystander, was holding Hector Peterson in her arms when he died. She was a mother herself. She cradled him in her lap—you can see the bloodstains here—and when Makhubu took the body from her and carried it away, she found a bullet caught in the folds of her skirt. She is holding that fatal bullet in her right hand, here.

  “Other people said that it didn’t happen like that at all. Lies and fantasies. When Nzima took this photograph, Hector Peterson was still alive! What you see here, according to one reliable caption, is a critically wounded youth. The police open fire, Hector falls at Mbuyisa’s feet. The boy picks him up and runs towards the nearest car, which happens to belong to Sam Nzima and Sophia Tema, a journalist on the World, Nzima’s partner that day. Sam takes his photographs. Then Mbuyisa and Tiny pile into the back of the Volkswagen—did I mention that it was a Volkswagen?—they pile into the back with Hector; Sam and Sophia pile into the front with their driver, Thomas Khoza. They rush to the Orlando Clinic, but Hector Peterson is certified dead on arrival. And that’s the real story. You can look it up for yourself.

  “But the theories persisted. So we thought we would try to lay the ghost—we have a duty after all to tell the truth. This is a museum, not a paperback novel. We advertised. We called on this woman to come forward and tell her story. We said it would be nice—although it wasn’t essential—if she brought the bullet with her.”

  “Anyone respond?”

  “I’ll say.”

  Reddy opened his lunch-box and pushed it over to Strickland with the edge of his palm, like a croupier. She looked at the contents: there were .38 Magnum slugs, 9mm and AK cartridges, shiny .22 bullets, a .357 hollow-point that had blossomed on impact into a perfect corolla. There were even a couple of doppies and a misshapen ball from an old voorlaaier. Strickland zoomed in for a close-up. She still didn’t get it.

  “If you’ll allow me a poetic licence,” Reddy said, as if poetic licence was a certificate you could stick on a page in your Book of Life, “this is the bullet that killed Hector Peterson.”

  So we didn’t advertise. But Strickland stuck to her guns about the WHITES ONLY bench: we would have the real thing or nothing at all. She made a few inquiries of her own, and wouldn’t you know it, before the week was out she turned up the genuine article.

  The chosen bench belonged to the Municipal Bus Drivers’ Association, and in exchange for a small contribution to their coffers—the replacement costs plus 10 per cent—they were happy to part with it. The honour of fetching the trophy from their clubhouse in Marshall Street fell to Pincus. Unbeknown to us, the Treasurer of the MBDA had decided that there was a bit of publicity to be gained from his Association’s public-spirited gesture, and when our representative arrived he found a photographer ready to record the event for posterity. Pincus was never the most politic member of our Committee. With his enthusiastic cooperation the photographer was able to produce an entire essay, which subsequently appeared, without a by-line, in the Saturday Star. It showed the bench in its original quarters (weighed down by a squad of bus drivers of all races, pin-up girls—whites only—looking over the drivers’ shoulders, all of them, whether flesh and blood or paper, saying cheese); the bench on its way out of the door (Pincus steering, the Treasurer pushing); being loaded onto the back of our bakkie (Pincus and the Treasurer shaking hands and stretching the cheque between them like a Christmas cracker); and finally driven away (Pincus hanging out of the window to give us a thumbs-up, the Treasurer waving goodbye, the Treasurer waving back at himself from the rear-view mirror). These pictures caused exactly the kind of headache Reddy had tried so hard to avoid. Offers of benches poured in from far and wide. Pincus was made to write the polite letters of thanks but no thanks. For our purposes, one bench is quite enough, thank you.

  You can see the WHITES ONLY bench now, if you like, in Room 27. Just follow the arrows. I may as well warn you that it says EUROPEAN ONLY, to be precise. There’s a second prohibition too, an entirely non-racial one, strung on a chain between the armrests: PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THIS BENCH. That little sign is Charmaine’s work, and making her paint it was Strickland’s way of rubbing turpentine in her wounds.

  When the genuine bench came to light, Charmaine received instructions to get rid of “the fake.” But she refused to part with it. I was persuaded to help her carry it into the storeroom, where it remained for a month or so. As the deadline for the opening neared, Charmaine would take refuge in there from time to time, whenever things got too much for her, and put the finishing touches to her creation. At first, she was furious about all the publicity given to the impostor. But once the offers began to roll in, and it became apparent that WHITES ONLY benches were not nearly as scarce as we’d thought, she saw an opportunity to bring her own bench out of the closet. The night before the grand opening, in the early hours, when the sky was already going grey behind the mine-dump on the far side of the parking lot, we carried her bench outside and put it in the arbour under the controversial kaffirboom.

  “When Strickland asks about it,” said Charmaine, “you can tell her it was a foundling, left on our doorstep, and we just had to take it in.” Funny thing is, Strickland never made a peep.

  I can see Charmaine’s WHITES ONLY bench now, from my window. The kaffirboom, relocated here fully grown from a Nelspruit nursery, has acclimatized wonderfully well. “Erythrina caffra, a sensible choice,” said Reddy, “deciduous, patulous, and umbrageous.” And he was quite right, it casts a welcome shade. Charmaine’s faithful copy reclines in the dapple below, and its ability to attract and repel our visitors never ceases to impress me.

  Take Mrs. King. And talking about Mrs. King, Mr. King is a total misnomer, of course. I must point it out to Reddy. The Revd. King, yes, and Dr. King, yes, and possibly even the Revd. Dr. King. But Mr. King? No ways.

  It seems unfair, but Charmaine’s bench has the edge on that old museum piece in Room 27. Occasionally I look up from my workbench, and see a white man sitting there, a history teacher say. While the schoolchildren he has brought here on an outing hunt in the grass for lucky beans, he sits down on our bench to rest his back. And after a while he pulls up his long socks, crosses one pink leg over the other, laces his fingers behind his head and closes his eyes.

  Then again, I’ll look up to see a black woman shuffling resolutely past, casting a resentful eye on the bench and muttering a protest under her breath, while the flame-red blossoms of the kaffirboom detonate beneath her aching feet.

  Biographical Notes

  At age eighteen Chris Abani was arrested in Nigeria as the mastermind of an alleged coup based on the “evidence” of his first novel. He was imprisoned two more times, tortured, and escaped assassination. Abani has published four volumes of poetry and four novels, including Grace-land and Virgin in Flames. His numerous awards include the PEN USA Freedom to Write, PEN Hemingway, and PEN Beyond Margins awards. He currently teaches at the University of California-Riverside. More information on Abani can be
found at Chrisabani.com.

  Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 and grew up in Khartoum, Sudan. After receiving a master’s degree from the London School of Economics (where she studied statistics), she moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, and currently resides in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of the novels Minaret and The Translator, as well as the short story collection Colored Lights. Her story “The Museum” won the 2000 Caine Prize for African Writing (often referred to as the African Booker).

  In 1957, at the age of twenty-seven, Chinua Achebe sent the only copy of his handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart to a typing service in London, where it languished for months until it was retrieved by a colleague traveling on business. Luckily the British publisher Heinemann took a chance on Achebe, and today, after dozens of books of fiction, poetry, and essays, he is the most widely read African writer in the world. Achebe has been actively involved in Nigerian politics as well as engaged in taking on Western perceptions of Africans in writing. Since the early 1990s, he has been a professor of languages and literature at Bard College.

  Perhaps the fastest rising star on the African literary scene, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. Adichie not only grew up in the same university town (Nsukka) as Achebe but in the very house he once lived in. Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the 2005 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, and her follow-up, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Prize. She was named a MacArthur fellow in 2008.

  José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola, and works as a writer and journalist in Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. Of his numerous books, three novels—Creole, The Book of Chameleons, and My Father’s Wives—have been translated into English.

  Writer and musician Mohammed Naseehu Ali is the son of an emir in Ghana. Ali chose to be educated in the United States, studying at the Interlochen Arts Academy and Bennington College. He has published one story collection, The Prophet of Zongo Street, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Doreen Baingana is the author of Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, which won the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, Africa Region. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a law degree from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. After working for several years in Washington, D.C., for the Voice of America, Baingana moved to Kampala and teaches there.

  Aziz Chouaki was born in Algiers in 1951. His mother bought him a guitar at the age of ten and he learned to play the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix—music that was forbidden by the repressive Algerian regime. Playing in nightclubs and studying literature soon became his focus. When Islamic terrorism appeared in Algeria in the 1990s, he began to receive death threats and moved to France. The Star of Algiers is the first of his three novels written in French to be translated into English. He currently lives in Paris.

  Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee is the idiosyncratic and reclusive author of twelve works of fiction, five nonfiction collections, and two volumes of memoirs. The novels The Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace each won the Booker Prize (the commonwealth’s most prestigious literary award), though Coetzee did not attend the award ceremonies. He did, however, attend the Nobel award ceremonies, where he gave an acceptance speech about the nature of duck calls. Coetzee received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas, but he was denied permanent residence in the United States because of his anti-Vietnam War protests. Although he is considered one of South Africa’s greatest living writers, since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide and in 2006 became a citizen of Australia.

  Mia (António Emílio Leite) Couto, Mozambique’s foremost novelist, was active in his country’s mid-1970s revolution against colonial Portugal, and has gone on to become a literary hero of his liberated country. Couto’s most celebrated novel, Under the Frangipani, draws readers into the world of the dead to find spirits old and new wrestling over the soul of Mozambique. Formerly the director of the news agency AIM, Couto was also editor in chief of the newspapers Tiempo and Notícias de Maputo. In 1985 he resigned from these posts to study biology; he currently works as an environmental biologist at Limpopo Transfrontier Park.

  Fatou Diome was born on the Senegalese island Niodior, where she was raised by her grandmother. She attended college in Dakar, supporting herself by working as a housekeeper. Diome moved to France in 1990 and has published two novels and a short story collection. She lives in Strasbourg, where she is completing a PhD.

  Born in Dakar in 1951, Boubacar Boris Diop is a prolific author of novels, plays, screenplays, and political works. He founded the independent Senegalese newspaper Sol. After twelve works written in French, Diop wrote his latest novel in Wolof, the dominant language of Senegal.

  Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah has said, “I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way.” Farah has lived in exile since 1976, when the Somalian government pronounced his second novel, The Naked Needle, treasonable. The author of more than a dozen works, including the novels Maps, Knots, and From a Crooked Rib, Farah currently resides in South Africa.

  Nadine Gordimer was a founding member of the banned African National Congress and has been called “the conscience of South Africa.” For nearly half a century her epic novels and short stories have articulated the real-life ramifications of apartheid on the lives of ordinary men and women. She is the author of nineteen story collections, as well as numerous novels, essay collections, and memoirs, winning many awards, including the Booker Prize. Despite her international fame, the South African government still banned her novels Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. When Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in 1991, Nelson Mandela still did not have the right to vote.

  Helon Habila credits E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel for spurring him back to school and writing. In 2001 Habila won the Caine Prize for African Writing for a selection from his first novel, Waiting for an Angel, as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Due to a lack of publishing venues in Nigeria at the time, Habila, like many other authors, had to self-publish his novel. Since then he has achieved international success and published a second novel, Measuring Time. He currently teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

  Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She earned her BA in English from Université Mohammed V in Rabat; her MA from University College, London; and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her highly acclaimed debut story collection, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in 2005, and her first novel, Secret Son, was published in early 2009. She currently teaches at the University of California-Riverside.

  Alain Mabanckou’s 2003 novel African Psycho, a comical and macabre take on a would-be Congolese serial killer, was the first of his seven novels to be translated into English (from his native French). Winner of the Prix Renaudot, France’s equal to the National Book Award, Mabanckou currently teaches Francophone literature at the University of California-Los Angeles.

  Algerian Mohamed Magani is at the epicenter of the Maghrebian literary landscape, which is made up of North African nations and includes Morocco and Tunisia. In 1987 Magani won the prestigious Grand Prix Littéraire International de la Ville d’Alger for his novel La Faille du Ciel. While it is nearly impossible to get your hands on hard copies of his and other Maghreb authors, excellent translations can be accessed online, courtesy of the heroic efforts of Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org).

  Zakes Mda is the pen name of Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mdais. The author of numerous plays and five novels, including The Whale Caller and The Madonna of Excelsior, Mda has a PhD from the University of Cape Town and teaches at the University of Ohio.

  Niq Mhlongo was born Murhandziwa Nicholas Mhlongo in Midway-Chiawelo Soweto, South Africa, in 1973, the eighth of ten children. His parents sent him to t
he Limpopo Province to escape violence and get an education. Despite the chaos and school closings surrounding Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, Mhlongo managed to graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. After Tears is his follow-up novel to the cult classic Dog Eat Dog. Mhlongo now works as a writer and journalist in Soweto.

  Patrice Nganang was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 1970, and holds a PhD from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Poet, novelist, and scholar, he is regarded as one of the most promising young Francophone writers, and has won several French awards, including the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar and the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire. His novel Dog Days has been translated into English. Nganang is a resident of Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

  Considered one of the leading contemporary Afrikaans writers, Marlene van Niekerk was born in 1954, on the farm Tygerhoek near Caledon in the Western Cape, South Africa. A poet, playwright, and fiction writer, she is best known for Triomf, her graphic and controversial novel about a poor Afrikaner family in post-apartheid Johannesburg. She is a professor at the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, Stellenbosch University, in South Africa.

  Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977, and attended university in Lisbon. He has exhibited as a painter, has worked as an actor, and has published five novels, two story collections, and a volume of poetry. His novels The Whistler and Good Morning Comrades have recently been translated into English.