Dancing the Death Drill

by Fred Khumalo

  Pitso couldn’t just stand there and watch. He crouched and barrelled forward, meaning to ram his head into Ngqavini’s midriff, but his opponent danced out of the way, and Pitso went crashing to the floor. He got up to have another go and saw Ngqavini charging at him with a knife.

  Just in time, the black sergeant in charge of the engine room delivered a mighty right to Ngqavini’s temple. The engine room resounded with a thud as the gangster fighter sagged to his knees, his knife clattering to the floor.

  Three black guards rushed down, armed with billy clubs.

  ‘Hardly a week into the journey, you’re already embarrassing us in front of the white officers,’ one of them said.

  Ngqavini, Pitso and Tlali were marched upstairs. The trial, such as it was, lasted about five minutes: who did what to whom, yes, thank you very much, all three of you are guilty. Sentence? Twenty lashes each with a sjambok, and four days in solitary confinement for Pitso and Ngqavini. Tlali’s burns saved him from a spell in solitary; he had to be taken to the hospital wing after getting his twenty lashes.

  Captain Portsmouth heard about the fight and walked into the officers’ mess just as the three prisoners were taking off their pants. Pitso looked up at him for a moment, then dropped his gaze in shame. After the sjambokking, which left their backs and buttocks with thick welts oozing blood, Ngqavini and Pitso were taken downstairs and bundled into the dark, windowless dungeon where they were to spend the next four days.

  CHAPTER 23

  By Pitso’s rough estimation, the dungeon he and Ngqavini had been thrown into, down in the hold of the ship, was three metres by three. The ceiling was so low they could barely walk upright. Because there was so little room to pace about, they were to spend most of the time sitting or lying on their thin coir mattresses, staring into the darkness. It was so dark they could hardly see their own hands. The limited light they did receive filtered through an air vent at the top of the cell door. Inside the cell sat a night-soil bucket which they had to share. Next to the bucket was a generous supply of newspapers, but not for reading purposes. And next to this was a basin with water, in which they were to wash their hands and a bucket of water from which they could drink.

  After only a few hours in the little cell, Ngqavini was attacked by a terrible bout of diarrhoea. Pitso cursed non-stop, Ngqavini cackling with laughter as he let rip. He hardly finished his business at the toilet when the door opened. A guard walked in. He had brought their food, he announced, trying his best not to breathe. For each person six thick slices of bread ladled with jam and a gallon of mahewu, a thick and very sweet drink made of mealie meal.

  ‘Take care of this food, gentlemen, because your next meal will only be delivered tomorrow morning.’

  ‘What time is it now?’ Pitso asked.

  ‘It is two in the afternoon.’

  ‘How long have we been here now?’

  ‘About two, three hours.’

  With those words, the guard pulled the door shut after him and locked it.

  They’d been there only three hours, yet it felt like a whole day. Now it was Pitso’s turn at the bucket. Ngqavini roared with laughter as Pitso groaned in the dark.

  Both men decided to keep their food for later. It was so hot down there they’d stripped down to their trousers. The air coming through the vent above the door was just enough to keep them alive. Apart from the sound of their own breathing, and the thudding of their hearts, it was quiet. The ride was smooth, with occasional bumps which reminded them they were not in their mothers’ wombs but on the precipice of a cliff the depth of which they couldn’t even imagine. Yet Pitso’s imagination was running wild: what if the ship were to slam into another ship and start sinking? Who would remember them? What if the floor on which they were lying were to suddenly cave in, unbeknownst to the people upstairs? What if some sea monster, whose eyes could see through the walls of ships, was watching them right now, biding his time before carving a hole at the base of the ship and grabbing them both for his evening snack?

  Pitso must have fallen asleep, for when he sat up on his mattress there was a strange sound in the cell. He strained his eyes, hoping to see something, anything, but it was useless – it was as dark as it had been when he’d gone to sleep. But the sound persisted. He listened.

  ‘I knew you were bound to wake up,’ a voice said in the darkness. ‘Can’t sleep on an empty stomach.’

  Ah, it was his cellmate eating. Pitso grimaced, revulsed at the idea of eating food inside such a smelly place.

  ‘Are you going to eat or what? If you aren’t eating, tell me. I’ll deal with your share. It’s unchristian to let food go to waste. That’s what my mother told me. Can’t let food go to waste, that’s what they teach you in jail.’

  Jislaaik, Pitso thought, I’m thirsty as hell. He extended his hand to where he’d put his gallon of mahewu, reached for it, lifted the spout to his mouth.

  ‘Easy on that drink. A sip at a time. Otherwise it will give you diarrhoea.’

  Pitso was meditating on the different shades of darkness that he was aware of – dusky, gloomy, inky, indigo – when he finally fell, again, into a dreamless sleep.

  When he woke up, he was famished. He fumbled around his section of the cell, looking for his food. He found the plate, but it was empty.

  ‘You ate my food,’ he cried out. ‘You stole my food.’

  ‘I thought you had no need for it,’ Ngqavini said casually, belching.

  Fists clenched, Pitso propelled himself forward in the general direction of Ngqavini’s voice. But the latter, out of sheer instinct, ducked out of the way, and connected a punch to Pitso’s stomach.

  Doubling over and blinking his eyes angrily, Pitso crouched, listened attentively to ascertain the direction from which Ngqavini’s heavy breathing came.

  Ngqavini chuckled and said, ‘Can you see my fist, friend?’ Then he punched his cellmate in the stomach again.

  Pitso staggered uneasily. Having regained his footing, he hurled himself forward, punching blindly. Ngqavini pushed him away, laughing. ‘Remember, my friend, I still have that knife. You want me to use it now?’

  Pitso threw a fist into the darkness. Luckily, it connected with Ngqavini’s left temple. Ngqavini delivered a welter of punches to Pitso’s face, until they both collapsed, exhausted.

  On the day of their release, Ngqavini told the sergeant who had come to open for them how Pitso had almost killed him with a knife.

  ‘He’s got a knife?’ asked the incredulous guard.

  ‘Yes, sir. I managed to wrestle it away from him. Coloured people and knives are good buddies.’

  ‘Bloody bushman,’ the sergeant rumbled. ‘I sentence you to one more day in this cell for carrying a knife.’

  ‘It’s not my knife. It’s his,’ Pitso protested.

  ‘Liar!’ cried Ngqavini.

  The guard punched Pitso in the gut and pushed him back into the cell before locking it.

  Ngqavini laughed, and shouted at Pitso in Afrikaans, a language he thought the Zulu-speaking guard probably wouldn’t understand, ‘Welcome to the world, fool!’

  CHAPTER 24

  One morning, as he was dozing in a chair in the hospital section, Captain Portsmouth was woken by a piercing scream. By the time he got to the source of the noise, a group of medical orderlies had gathered around two adjoining beds, whispering urgently between themselves. Portsmouth approached the beds and discovered two lifeless men lying there.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ the senior medical orderly exclaimed when he saw the dead bodies. He frowned, taking a closer look. ‘Look at the faces; so black and almost brittle. What could have caused this? It looks like a contagious disease.’

  ‘No time to wonder what killed them,’ said Portsmouth. ‘We have to get rid of the corpses, or the entire ship will be contaminated.’

  Somebody ran to get the chaplain and the master of the ship, Captain Yardley.

  A few minutes later, the captain and Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha walked
in. Tall, regal of bearing, Reverend Dyobha was one of those men who exuded power and charisma. When he walked, everyone got out of the way, including the white officers.

  ‘I came as soon as I received your call, Captain,’ Reverend Dyobha said.

  ‘We need you, as a man of the cloth, to say a prayer for the two men …’ Yardley’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Couldn’t we wait until we reached the next port, to give them a proper burial?’ the reverend asked.

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t wait any longer. I don’t want my ship contaminated,’ said Yardley.

  The man of faith nodded gravely. Captain Portsmouth volunteered to join Reverend Dyobha as he said a eulogy for the fallen men. Ngqavini and Tlali, who had joined the small group, started a song:

  Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere …

  The others joined him. When the song was over, Ngqavini shouted a Zulu war cry: ‘Uyadela wen’osulapho!’ Oh, how I wish I were you!

  ‘What’s going to happen to the corpses?’ Tlali asked quietly, as the men were walking out of the hospital section.

  Ngqavini explained, ‘The reverend and the hospital orderlies are going to throw the corpses overboard.’

  Tlali was shocked. ‘These men won’t have proper graves? You are telling me their bodies are going to be eaten by the monsters of the sea? Ah, their spirits will never know peace. Their spirits shall roam these seas forever.’

  As they were dispersing, Ngqavini bumped into Pitso. The two looked at each other, then Ngqavini spat on the floor, in front of Pitso.

  Portsmouth caught him by the lapel of his jacket, and said, ‘Soldier! Wipe that spit of yours off the floor.’

  ‘Sorry, Captain, I will go and find a cloth.’

  ‘With your tongue, soldier. On your knees! Now! Lick it up with your tongue, take it back where it belongs.’

  Ngqavini got to his knees. Three white officers who were passing by – officers who had always thought Captain Portsmouth was soft on the kaffirs, always chatting cordially with them – smiled at what they saw.

  ‘That’s right, Captain. Put them in their place,’ said one of them, who had the red face of a heavy drinker.

  Captain Portsmouth ignored the comment and hobbled down the steps, towards his cabin, to rest for a while. But he couldn’t find peace, thinking over the way Pitso and Ngqavini interacted with one another. So he went onto the deck, where most of the men were basking in the sun. Some were chatting excitedly, others staring into the distance in silence, possibly shaken by the recent deaths. Just then, they spotted a school of dolphins swimming about happily in the distance.

  ‘Is that a shark?’ someone called out.

  ‘No, it’s a whale. My God, it’s going to topple our ship!’

  The men laughed, as they could see that the whale was too far in the distance to do them any harm.

  ‘Hey you!’ Captain Portsmouth shouted at Tlali, who came running up to him. ‘Where’s your friend?’

  ‘Down in the engine room, sir.’

  ‘And the other man, Ngavuvu, or whatever his name is? The loud Zulu?’

  ‘Oh, that would be Ngqavini, sir. He is also down there in the engine room, sir.’

  ‘Go get them right this very minute. Get two men to replace them in the engine room. I want the two of them up here. Now!’

  Tlali saluted and disappeared down the stairs, marching proudly in his uniform, which he kept spotlessly clean. Captain Portsmouth paced up and down, deep in thought.

  A few minutes later, Ngqavini and Pitso stood in front of him. He glared at them. ‘You rotten lot are full of bad blood. We must drain it out of you before you infect everyone on this ship.’

  He picked six men and told them to follow him downstairs. The four white officers who had been standing on deck, smoking and joking, paused to watch, as there seemed to be some urgency in Captain Portsmouth’s manner.

  When Captain Portsmouth disappeared downstairs, followed by confused men, the officers decided to follow at a distance, to see what was happening. When they reached the dining hall, Captain Portsmouth told the men to clear the tables and chairs away, and stack them in a corner. They obeyed. He hobbled away to his cabin. When he came back, he had two pairs of boxing gloves.

  ‘Men! We are starting a boxing tournament today,’ he said. ‘To get the games started, I call upon Pitso and ’Gavini, to show you men how it’s done.’

  Pitso and Ngqavini exchanged stunned glances.

  Captain Portsmouth threw the boxing gloves on the floor, in the middle of the improvised arena. He strode towards Ngqavini, grabbed him by the lapels of his shirt, and said, ‘Pick up those gloves. Put them on. What are you waiting for? We need to deal with your anger.’

  Ngqavini took off his shirt and reached for the gloves. He looked odd, fumbling his hands into these padded, oversized things. He would have preferred a bare-knuckle encounter.

  Pitso stripped to the waist, picked up his gloves and put them on, by trial and error, as he had never touched a pair of boxing gloves in his life either.

  There was a murmur of excitement in the crowd. Reverend Dyobha strode in, his face beaming. As a younger man, before he went to seminary to train as a priest, Reverend Dyobha had tried his hand at boxing.

  ‘Brilliant move, Portsmouth,’ one of the white officers said. ‘Wonder why we didn’t think of this earlier.’

  ‘I bought the gloves in Durban because I suspected that we might need to start a boxing training club, to kill the long hours of our journey. Now is the time,’ Captain Portsmouth explained. ‘Used to be a keen boxer myself at military college in England. Bim-bam-bim-bam-bang! Love the sport, I do.’

  He moved to the centre of the makeshift arena, held Pitso and Ngqavini each by the hand and said, ‘Now, listen carefully, chaps. No holding, no biting, no kicking, no punching below the belt. The sound of the bell will mark the beginning or the end of a round. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ they said in unison, preparing themselves for the fight.

  Captain Portsmouth stepped back, reached for an enamel plate, which he banged with a spoon. The gladiators started dancing about. Pitso threw a left jab which caught Ngqavini on his right temple, stunning him.

  Ngqavini cried out, ‘Jesu-Maria-Josefa!’

  He floated to the left and when Pitso closed in, intent on following his left jab with a right, Ngqavini dropped into a tiger’s crouch. Pitso’s right flew just above his head. Ngqavini bobbed back to the surface, bombarding Pitso’s face with a welter of blows, to the excitement of the crowd.

  Portsmouth banged the enamel plate. The fighters stopped.

  There were whistles and shouts as the men retired to their ‘corners’. Tlali had taken on the role of Pitso’s coach. ‘Pitso, you are fighting with your heart. You are angry. Take a deep breath, and watch the man’s shoulders and fists, not his eyes. If you look at his eyes, you will get angry, but when you watch his shoulders, and his arms, you can tell which punch he’s going to throw next.’

  The bell sounded. Pitso ran into the arena as if shot out of a gun, stopped only by Ngqavini’s left jab, which caught him on his right cheek. Ngqavini followed up with an uppercut to the jaw. Pitso sagged and dropped to the wooden floor. The fight was over.

  The bout between Pitso and Ngqavini marked the beginning of a very popular weekly tradition. The boxing matches, in turn, paved the way for other recreational activities. Reverend Dyobha approached Captain Portsmouth one day and thanked him for his thoughtfulness in starting the boxing club. ‘Through the boxing, you are catering to the physical needs of our men. But man is a more complex animal. I cater to the spiritual needs of these young fellows. Would it not be nice, however, to start a school for these men with literacy classes? Many of them can’t even spell their own names, let alone read the Holy Book.’

  A few days later, men started attending reading and writing classes in both English and their own languages. This kept everyone busy, from officers down to members of the crew,
whose shifts had to be rearranged to give them time to attend classes.

  The officers generally played bridge. Captain Portsmouth, when he was not busy with literacy classes or boxing matches, relaxed by playing the piano. He mostly played waltzes, especially those of Johann Strauss II – The Blue Danube, Morgenblätter, Kaiser-Walzer. The other officers used to laugh, ‘The fucking Krauts started the war and you are playing their music!’

  ‘Strauss was Austrian, not German,’ he would respond.

  ‘Even worse,’ they would retort. ‘It was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an Austrian, who started this war by getting himself killed. And his cousins in Germany took umbrage. That’s why we are all in the shit. Some of our men are probably going to drown in that Blue Danube you are busy celebrating.’

  When they were not taunting Captain Portsmouth, the officers also boxed – but only with ranked opponents. No officer wanted to be humiliated by one of the ‘boys’, although they didn’t admit to that. They simply argued rank didn’t allow an officer to tangle with a mere member of the labour contingent. The ‘boys’ laughed themselves silly watching the officers, fat men dawdling all over the fighting arena with no sense of rhythm and timing. Captain Portsmouth and Reverend Dyobha had taught the men that boxing, like dancing, required rhythm. A typical fight sounded like this: Tap-tap, boom! Tap-tap, boom. Boom-boom-boom, bah!

  In one of his inspired moments, Ngqavini, aided by four of his tribesmen, did a demonstration of a typical Zulu war dance, which was enjoyed by all. Captain Portsmouth was amazed at the similarities between some of Ngqavini’s dance moves and the rhythm of a typical boxing fight: you charge forward twice, and you retreat one step. Move to the right, charge three times with your left hand thrust forward, and retreat two steps. You pause. You start the process all over again.