Permanent Removal

by Cowell, Alan S.

  “It’s one of our best features,” I said with false joviality, but I was thinking of Molly Blackburn, the Black Sash activist who had called to tell me of Nyati’s death. She had died in what was officially listed as a tragic mishap, an accident on the highway involving a driver who had lost control of the vehicle that struck her Kombi head on. Road accidents had once been part of the repertoire of state terror. Maybe they still were. If Nyati’s daughter had not pulled on the hand brake, I could all too easily have careened into the white pickup across the road ahead of me.

  Knysna had once projected itself as a genteel bastion of whiteness, a retirement and vacation settlement with dainty restaurants on Leisure Island, connected to the mainland by a causeway that carried the maids and other domestic staff to and fro at dawn and dusk – the metronome of what apartheid’s planners called separate development. But since the early 1990s, reality and demography had combined to synchronise the place with the new political and economic realities. Hawkers and peddlers flourished on the main thoroughfare and black faces far outnumbered those of whites.

  To the east, the N2 highway clambered up from sea level in gracious curves, fringed with an irrepressible growth of shacks and shanties. Children dodged trucks as they crossed from one side to the other. A rogue cow meandered along the black-top, unattended.

  Further on, the road signs advertised Bed and Breakfast accommodation and bric-a-brac stalls, yellowwood furniture stores and places selling cheese and wine. Closer to my destination, where Celiwe Nyati would leave me to travel on alone, I espied a place that had not been there at all in my earlier days. Kwanokuthula was a brand new township of breeze-block, matchbox houses and overhead electricity supply lines, stretching back geometrically from the roadside to accommodate people drawn to the jobs of the resort. Technically, it offered homes in something other than unplanned and unlawful settlements.

  But already you could see impromptu extensions erupting in the tiny yards of the formal housing. Mini-buses hurtled back and forth in an endless shuttle, crammed with paying passengers, as impossibly laden as their equivalents in Kenya or Zimbabwe. New ways had surged south, their tide pressing into every fissure of what the whites had sought to preserve as their exclusive sanctuary, their redoubt.

  Celiwe Nyati had chosen this final moment to nap. In rest, her features lost their anger and she looked younger and less ferocious than the persona she assumed on the barricades with her bullhorn and her slogans.

  I tried to imagine life from her perspective, growing up in the final days of apartheid, when the men in the police trucks still wielded absolute power over their comings and goings, just as they had in her father’s day, ensnaring the people in a web of oppressive bureaucracy and physical control, reinforced by the ever-present threat of state violence. Perhaps, in her earliest years, it had seemed that the weight would never lift, that she would be condemned forever to entering stores from separate entrances, living in segregated townships, attending poor schools with none of the abundant sports fields and well-equipped laboratories as at those reserved for whites.

  But then, watching on television as Mandela walked free with his wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, at his side, she would have shared the thrill that pulsed across the nation and around the globe: finally, irrevocably, freedom had been sealed by the presence of this man, reclaiming his land after 27 years of incarceration. No longer would her skin colour relegate her to third or fourth class status. No longer would the pigmentation of the Race Ogres enthrone them as the overlords.

  The songs and refrains and slogans – Free Nelson Mandela – had built to this moment of his release, like the storm on the highway, purging the past. And here he was, in the flesh, the great redeemer. A nation’s wish had been granted.

  At her father’s funeral, cocooned in a blanket on her mother’s warm back, how could she or anyone else have known that the martyrdom of Solomon Nyati and all the others would bring the land to such a momentous turning point?

  The emergency decree, proclaimed within hours of his burial, was the admission by the Race Ogres that they had lost the initiative, the momentum of oppression, and could rule no longer by anything approaching consent. Power was slipping, oozing irrevocably away. After his release, Mandela himself had journeyed to the monument erected to honour her father and his comrades. And he had called them the true heroes of The Struggle.

  But then, as she grew, as she heard the legends, as she absorbed the horror of her father’s murder, how could she have squared his heroism with its legacy? In Cooktown township, the shanties were just as bleak, the tubercular coughs just as wracking, AIDS victims just as grey and skinny. She had lost her father. For what? So that men would still stand in lines on roadsides begging for work; so that her mother would yearn for release from her private suffering? No one had ever asked her permission for his sacrifice.

  I wondered how she felt when the hearings began at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Theron, the killer, began his grim reprise – the manacles on her father’s wrists; the drive to the dunes; the single bullet through his skull before the incinerations. And this same man walked free while her father would never again take her in his arms, help her with her studies, or bring her a gift from a journey and share quiet, special times.

  A shell of rage had been grafted onto her and she was trapped behind it. Anger came much more easily than trust. Formally, her land had moved on, but I wondered whether she had made that transition, too.

  Celiwe Nyati stirred awake as we began the approach to Plettenberg Bay, blinking into the brightness, checking her cell phone for messages, stifling a yawn behind a balled hand. I felt an unfamiliar sense of my own inadequacies: I doubted I would have a child of my own to accompany on that voyage from innocence to adulthood. The years had advanced too far for that. But how lonely that voyage must be – the daughter of the martyred hero, the public face of her cohort – struggling to locate herself in a world of peril and uncertainty without Solomon Nyati’s wisdom, resenting fate’s theft of her father ever more keenly. Many had fallen in that cause, not only her father. But where was the solace in freedom’s failing, in the betrayal of his Struggle?

  “You know, if you ever want to come to Washington …” I heard myself saying.

  After the Portuguese discovered Plettenberg Bay for Europe, they called it Bahia Formosa, the Bay of Beauty. The first foreign settlers were 100 mariners stranded for nine months after a Portuguese vessel, the San Gonzales, went down with the loss of many hands in 1630. The town took its name from Joachim van Plettenberg, the Dutch East India Company’s governor of the Cape Colony in the late 18th century.

  On the websites I consulted before I embarked on my journey from Cape Town, the annals seemed to focus more on these intrusions rather than on any indigenous populations after the first evidence of habitation in the Middle Stone Age. But that may have been simply because the outsiders had left a greater trove of written records. Of course, history’s lessons are rarely confined to the past – a phenomenon I had observed in other places of elemental conflict, from the Balkans to the Middle East, where much energy was devoted to establishing prior claim to the narrative attached to this piece of territory or that.

  From the 1960s, the town grew into a premier white resort town, a place that people reached by a long drive south in cars laden with surfboards, towing boats with powerful engines – a modern reversal of the Great Trek. Even settlers far to the north, from lands that would be renamed Zambia and Zimbabwe after their ceremonies of independence, embarked on journeying along strip roads and across dry riverbeds to bathe and tan and relax here.

  Vacationers constructed big villas, vying with one another for the most grand, the best-designed, and the most (or least) tasteful. Smaller places of only three or four en suite bedrooms grew like seedlings in the shadows of the great mansions with the prime ocean views.

  Developers built condos, golf courses, polo pitches, cheek by jowl with tumbledown squatter camps. At the heigh
t of the resort’s prosperity, the airport – a single, low building with wheeled trolleys to carry the luggage from the dirt strip – could not cope with the number of private planes clamouring for landing rights.

  Even now, with the softening of hindsight, it was hard to shake my own guilty memories of that era – witnessing the fiery funerals and the protests in cramped, miserable, higgledy-piggledy townships. Then returning home to find friends using the pool and tennis court in the two acres of lawn and flower garden that seemed a natural adjunct to every home in my new neighbourhood; plunging baptismally into the chlorine tang to wash the smear of teargas from my hair and skin; driving out from the plump affluence of my suburb to the raw hillsides of tilting shacks and land scraped clean of all flora and fauna that made up the so-called homelands where the government banished millions of black people; then back to my luxurious stockade, my gilded prison, while those I had met hours, minutes earlier enjoyed no such release.

  At the Shell gas station as we awaited the Intercape bus, Celiwe Nyati’s eyes set again into the hard gaze she had cast over the hotel staff in Cape Town. I had pulled in to fuel the car. I knew enough of her by now to guess that she was seething at the sight of her kinfolk doomed to perform the same menial tasks as ever before – pumping gas, cleaning windscreens, checking oil and water, running the cash tills – while the people they served took the great racial and economic imbalances for granted, as if they had been given a “Get out of jail free” card.

  “What has my mother told you to do?”

  “Just to ask around. Make inquiries. Quietly.”

  “Then please find her the answers she wants. She is burning inside. She is trapped in her own past. If the answers will release her, then please set her free. But soon.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we will punish the perpetrators.”

  “We?”

  “The People.”

  “Like before? In The Struggle? People’s courts?”

  “An eye for an eye.”

  “That seems very harsh in this new nation of yours, for a new generation.”

  “You are forgetting who I am. You are forgetting that I was robbed of my father and the killer has not been punished.”

  I tried to couch my response as gently as I could. “Don’t you think that he fought for a new nation where people talked out their differences instead of fighting? Don’t you think he fought for peace, forgiveness?”

  “Do not presume to tell me about my father. One story about a boy on a bicycle and you suddenly know everything that is to be known. No – don’t interrupt me! My father was a revolutionary, a fighter. He took comrades out of the country for military training. He believed what Mandela said at his trial that the apartheid regime had left the people with no choice but to take up the armed struggle. He was not some Western liberal. He was a communist! You are surprised to hear that? Why do you think there were so many red banners at his funeral? He was a commander! He believed in the power of the gun barrel. I am his daughter. It is my duty to carry on the fight until the last vestiges are defeated. Until we have truly created the land he fought for without corruption and nepotism. Until then there can be no forgiveness. We are the wretched of the earth. ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry.’ – That is what Frantz Fanon said.”

  “But your father faced a different enemy,” I said. “He faced the apartheid regime. He faced the men with guns and Casspirs who came into Cooktown and arrested and tortured people. He did that to make a new land for you.”

  “The enemy was and is oppression. The battle is not over. He did not fight so that women would be abused and politicians would get rich and the apartheid killers would walk free. Look here. At this place. Who is driving the cars? Who is cleaning the windscreens and filling the tanks? Can you see that nothing has changed? My father will – and must be – avenged.”

  The Intercape rumbled in, debouching bleary-eyed passengers with backpacks and bulging travel bags bound with twine. She clambered aboard, taking a seat on the upper deck. Just as the bus pulled out, she glanced down at me. I thought she might be about to offer a wave of farewell, a smile to acknowledge our shared journey so far. But her fingers curled into a small, tight fist, and her face set into its mask of anger.

  “Welcome to Plett-on-sea,” the gas attendant said cheerily. “Oil, water, tires, okay?

  Eleven

  A CROWDED ROOM. YOU ARE THE stranger, the interloper. Tolerated, not embraced. People are introduced to you, then move on. Their eyes betray suspicion. If they linger, their questions are barbed. They seek motives, not answers.

  For much of my professional life, my social rhythm had been set by the embossed invitation cards that mark the stations of the diplomatic cross. I had gone forth into crowds of strangers. I had manoeuvred my way around grand salons, below chandeliers, navigating a path between liveried attendants and bemedalled generals and unctuous officials to close on my target – a particular under-secretary, an ambassador with discreet connections – to press a specific point of policy.

  I had progressed from Junior Attaché (Press and Information) to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, mixing confidently with kings and presidents, clothed in the vicarious mantle of a power that none could equal.

  Here, on this wooden deck above a vast moonlit bay, I was the alien, the Other. This was the cabal of which Zoë Joubert had spoken in Cape Town, the assembly of almost-40-year-olds who had minted their credentials in The Struggle and who now sought their niches in the new dispensation, far from the tin roof of Old Deep.

  Among them were some who had been present at Nyati’s last known meeting before his death. Among them was the Judas.

  A barbecue sizzled with fresh-caught fish – Cape salmon and yellowtail, prepared in luscious marinades of oil and garlic and spices. Cold bottles bobbed in a zinc bathtub filled with water and ice. A table bore hard stuff: tequila with salt and lemon, vodka, Scotch. Chatter fizzed, sparkled, subsided in knowing smiles – conversations borne on dark currents that sometimes broke the surface in ripples of intimate laughter, shared memories.

  …and Gerry, of course, thought she was waiting for him…

  … and in The Struggle we all suffered, though relatively, and you, were you, you know, recruited?

  When she introduced me to her friends, the names brought faint memories of manila files, seen at the embassy in the old days – requests for comment on Fulbright scholarships, visa applications, some rejected on the grounds of suspected communist sympathies, a catchall for undesirables. Here they were: Nils, the lawyer and Clarissa – gosh, another lawyer – and Jenny, the reflexologist married to Colin, the singer, and Rod Harris, the poet, my ex, actually. Father of Mills. A blur of names: Dave, the impresario and Johnny, the film director. Producer, actually. Martie. Neil. Riaan van Rensburg. Cathy and Rachel and Ferd.

  And this is Tom Kinzer. A friend. No history offered. No rap sheet. A rogue male from another herd of a different stripe altogether. Even my sense of appropriate casual clothing seemed, well, inappropriate – neatly pressed chinos and laundered polo shirt, obviously different from the preferred combo of baggy pants cut to calf length and loose-fitting, quasi-Hawaiian shirts. My hair was too short, my skin too sallow.

  People who bothered to take a second look at me sometimes divined a Semitic or Mediterranean background – Lebanese, Israeli perhaps – although my grandparents had converted long before they fled Germany and the South Tirol for New York in the late 1930s.

  I remembered the curious patter of their conversation, laced with phrases of German and Italian and Yiddish, as if they sometimes awoke from the American dream to seek some linguistic connection to the old world they had left behind. When I left for South Africa with my degree in law and my State Department credentials, they called me meshugganah, crazy.

  I took a beer from the icy bathtub, scanning the crowd, but detected no questioning looks, no surreptitious glances to confirm recognition.r />
  The heat was moist, close, begging rain and thunderclaps. The teenage children of the celebrants – not Zoë’s daughter, I noticed – clustered under the palms in the garden below the deck to build cigarettes from the local marijuana. The parents rolled their own: Durban poison, Malawi gold. I thought, too, that I recognised the surreptitious rituals of cokeheads, signalling with a raised eyebrow, a casual nod, that a line was being prepared in some locked side room with a glass-topped table.

  As the hostess, Zoë Joubert – taut, bobbed, chiaroscuro in a loose-fitting black muslin robe over her trim athlete’s body, a slight, quizzical wrinkling at the corner of her eyes – was busy ensuring that people had drinks, food, company. She moved effortlessly between friends, contacts, men who clung to her with unfinished dreams in their eyes that their wives pretended not to notice. She left happiness and longing in her wake.

  I sensed tripwires, faultlines known only to the intimates – Colin and Rod and Clarissa and Riaan. Being among her friends redefined her through a prism of old secrets to which I would never be privy. Watching them mingle, I felt her slip away.

  “And what line are you in, Thomas? Tom?”

  It is a man introduced to me as Riaan. Riaan van Rensburg. He is younger and taller than I but has allowed himself to run to seed. A belly swells and heaves beneath a loose shirt with bright patterns of green palms and orange flowers – camouflage. He is holding a bottle of Castle Lager, beaded with condensation. The red and yellow label has slipped slightly where it has become unstuck in the water of the bathtub.

  He has been in charge of the barbecue – the braai as it is called – and there is sweat on his forehead, collecting in corrugations of thick worry lines. His hair is black, formed into a widow’s peak, with bold slashes of white at the temples. His brown eyes, slightly bloodshot and bulbous, remind me of a badly trained Labrador, supplicant but deaf to the most simple commands.