by Nick Wood
Azanian Bridges
Nick Wood
NewCon Press
England
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
For Abner, and to the non-repetition of history.
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” – Steve Biko, 1971. (‘I Write What I Like.’)
First published in the UK by NewCon Press
41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF
NCP 093 (limited edition hardback)
NCP 094 (softback)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Azanian Bridges copyright © 2016 by Nick Wood
Cover Art copyright © 2016 by Vincent Sammy
All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
ISBN:
978-1-910935-11-8 (hardback)
978-1-910935-12-5 (softback)
Cover Art by Vincent Sammy
Cover layout by Andy Bigwood
Edited by Ian Whates
Interior layout by Storm Constantine
eBook converted by handebooks.co.uk
Chapter 1
Sibusiso’s Start
I never knew it would be so hard to say goodbye, especially to my father. (I leave him until last.)
“Sala kahle, tata!” I say, bowing my face so he cannot see my eyes.
For a brief moment, he holds me close to him and I can smell the Earth: sweet, sharp sweat and the decades of cattle manure on his skin. His jacket buttons poke into my stomach – he has dressed for this occasion too. He is so like a fragile bird – a kiewietjie comes to mind for some reason – but then he pushes me away, turns and walks off in a hurry and without looking back. He has left me with a little gift, a small beige plastic digi-disc, on which I can record the happenings in my life.
I put it in my pocket.
Since when did my father get so old, so delicate, so suddenly?
I look over my brother and sisters’ heads to watch his stiff blue-jacketed back disappear into the house. The brown door shuts against yellow brick and the late afternoon sun glints off the corrugated silver eaves and roof.
Behind our master’s house, I hear the cows sounding out as a dog barks, unsettling them.
Lindiwe is crying openly but I keep my own eyes dry. I am the eldest son; I am strong.
There is time for one last hug before the taxi arrives.
Mandla grips my arm tightly. “Careful brother,” his eyes are almost on a level with my own, despite the three years I have on him, “There is much danger and distraction in the city.”
I nod and brush my lips with the back of my left hand to hide my smile: “I hear what you say, Mandla – you repeat Father too – but I will be careful.”
He grins and puffs his fifteen-year old chest, which looks increasingly like a solid drum of utshwala besizulu - but only the finest of beer.
A high-pitched car hooter sounds behind me. Father had to pay much to have the man detour off his route to come here.
My five sisters wave as I step with difficulty into the crowded taxi; the door is slid fully open, the minibus is silver and muddy brown from the farm track’s splatter of early-summer showers.
The driver accelerates before I can sit. I fall into a large woman’s lap and realise there is little available seating. She shovels me aside with a large forearm and I sway, trapped between her fat hip and a thin man’s sharp thighbone. He wriggles a bit like a contortionist and my buttocks manage to find some sticky leather to ease the weight off my feet.
My grey Sunday slacks stick to the seat, as we sway around and bump over farm potholes.
The ‘gamchee’, as the Cape Coloured people call them, waves a hand towards me from the front seat: “Where you going again, boy?”
“Fundimiso College, Im– Imbali,” I say, finding it hard to breathe, crushed as I am as the large woman squeezes against me.
The gamchee turns to the driver, who is accelerating into a violent right-turn onto the tarred road: “Seems like we have a clever boy in our taxi, hey Smokes?”
Smokes just grunts from under his Man U cap and shakes his dreads. I see he has an OPod plugged into his ears.
I plug an earpiece into my own ears, folding my arms tightly over my old music pod and the rands strapped in a leather purse across my stomach inside my white buttoned shirt, the purse hot and wet against my skin from the late afternoon heat.
The sky still looks clear – no gathering thunderstorm tonight it seems. I glance across at the passengers swaying and talking in front of me. They’re arguing about the price of bread.
I am too tired to listen and try to sleep. Keeping my arms crossed across my hidden money pouch, I doze in fits and starts to random braking, accelerations and Church-Rap from the Crischen-Niggaz.
I finally fall asleep to Muth’fuckas Who Don’t Know Jesus…
The fat woman is climbing over me and I see she has a baby hanging off her right hip, swinging it onto her back as she steps outside. It’s built like me; it keeps right on sleeping…
Then I see the driver getting out too – what’s his name?
I look across to the open door and see I’m the last one inside. I stretch and rub my eyes. My OPod has gone silent.
A big white man with a fierce brown handlebar moustache and blue police cap sticks his head inside: “Out, kaffir!”
Hayi no, it must be a roadblock.
I step outside, sweating hard, although the sun is low and the air is cooling.
There’s a mellow yellow police van parked in front of us. We’re pulled off to the side of the road, traffic whooshing past us and down the hill, down into the smoky valley of umGungundlovu – or Pietermaritzburg as the boere like to call the place.
So close, why did they have to stop us now?
Fierce-moustache policeman is going through the driver’s papers. Two other black cops are rummaging through our taxi, looking for guns or drugs, probably both.
“Hey, line up!” the white cop shouts, throwing the driver’s papers back at him. Smokes, that’s his name, catches the papers deftly with a weary shrug of his shoulders and turns back to his cab.
We stand in a ragged line, all nine of us, as he slowly works his way through our dompas. My hands are clammy as I pull mine out of my hip pocket.
He moves alongside me and snatches it from my hand; as if angry they’ve all been in order so far.
I sweat, even though it’s getting cold, the sun sinking below the city’s smog.
He looks at me and I’m reminded of Ballie Boetze, the big white South African world-boxing champion from several decades ago – whose face has received a nostalgic comeback on TV since his death, advertising Rocket Jungle Weetie-Oats.
“Hey, why you sweating so much, boy, what you hiding?”
“Nothing, sir!” I hate my sweat and my use of ‘sir’, but all I want is to get to college safely.
“Ach man, they can go!” He slaps my dompas into my open palms.
I see the two black cops are standing behind him, hands on hips, empty.
“Next time I’ll give you a bledy fine for over-crowding, hey!” he shouts at us as we climb back into the taxi.
Sm
okes lights a cigarette, but no one says anything.
This time I find a space next to the window and keep my face averted from the others, watching the lights popping up like fireflies, as the quick dusk deepens into murky darkness.
The rest of the journey is made in a tense silence. As for me, I shake until the end.
I miss my father already.
Chapter 2
Martin’s Made
Dan dumps the cardboard box in front of me. Roughly the size of a shoe box, it’s packaged tightly in brown paper and yellow duct tape, the words ‘Extremely Fragile’ scored in red ink over the American stamps of Obama and Malcolm X.
“How the hell did you get that through customs?” I ask.
Dan taps his pale curved nose and smiles: “Let’s just say we had to exceed our grant budget a bit.”
I grin back at him, aware my heart is starting to race.
Ten whole years of sweat, tears and thoughts are contained in this small, heavy package. What the hell will we do if it doesn’t work?
Dan isn’t wasting time, he’s already cutting through the tape with a wicked pair of scissors. I double-check to make sure his office door is firmly shut.
He tears the paper away, revealing an innocuous-looking plain metallic box. His usually obsessively neat office is littered with scraps of paper, but he doesn’t seem to care.
Nor do I.
Unable to sit still, I stand up. I have to do something.
He takes a deep breath and opens the box, unclipping the secured hook that has been inserted on top. Without pausing, he pulls it open.
“It’s uh – smaller and duller than I expected,” I say.
He grins at the disappointment that must be written over my face.
“Ja, I know – the miracles of miniaturisation. It’s amazing how quickly stuff gets smaller and smaller. As for the colour…” He shrugs, “I thought black would be unobtrusive.”
“In this country, that’s a bloody joke,” I crane my neck forward. “They’ve kept markings to a minimum.”
‘That’s just the top,” he says, tilting the box-like cube carefully and cradling its corner as he slides the machine out. “Let’s have a proper look at ‘Helen’, shall we?”
I smile; Helen was Dan’s wife, a lawyer with mind-reading abilities that would put any psychologist to shame. “It looks like something that’s been dropped out of a fucking plane crash.”
Dan wags a finger at me and then, using his right hand to support it, places the box squarely on the table, right side up.
I kneel down on the floor - kneecaps pressing uncomfortably on his checked Formica floor - in order to get a better look at our box. Dan steps to my side of the desk, so that we can both see it clearly.
There are two sets of holes on either side of the box for brain-electrode leads – a power-cord no doubt attaches to the back. The face of the box has an on-off switch on the front, a small power bulb to register current and a big dial with a small digital display on either side – ‘Import’ on one side, ‘Export’ on the other.
Apart from that, there is a small power bar display on the right side of the front of the black box, entitled: ‘Signal Fidelity.’ And, right next to it, a small switch labelled ‘record.’
“Record?” I look up at Dan.
He gives a cynical smile. “Jonny, our neuro-engineer, reckoned we could also record captured brainwaves into the neural software.”
No wonder he looks sceptical; but Jonny Duke has no equal in this country.
A knock on the door makes both of us jump. It swings open immediately.
A man leans in, a familiar grey-haired and prissy looking man – a polka dot bow tie of all things flowering hideously at the top of his blue shirt and a brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow pads. I am not surprised to see him, perhaps alerted by the faint stench of mothballs before the door opened.
“What on Earth are you doing, Dr. van Deventer, have you become a Muslim?”
I stand slowly on creaking knees and Dan crosses his arms and grins: “I think you’ll find Muslims don’t prostrate themselves before anything other than the real Black Stone in Mecca, Dr. James!”
“Ah, Dr. Botha,” the old man turns slowly, but not enough to face him directly, looking at him askance. “So how is academia treating you – and what rats are you experimenting on now, here in your Ivory Tower?”
Dan’s cheeks stiffen as he clenches his teeth. He takes a slow breath and then smiles sweetly, “What brings you here, my dear Dr. James?”
The senior psychiatrist turns to me: “This afternoon’s ward round in the admissions ward has been brought forward to one p.m., so I’m afraid you will have to cut your University visit short.”
I feel in my pocket and haul out my cell-phone: “Your PA could have told me that.”
He gives a little sniffy chuckle, “Indeed.” He looks me up and down, “But given I am your senior I thought it prudent to know what your University business actually is.”
He glances pointedly at the Black Box.
Dr. Ronald James has always been proud of his 1820 English settler roots and never fails to ‘elocute’ carefully, so I weigh up my responding words. Dan is glaring across at me and I know I need to be extra cautious. “I can’t say much at this stage, it’s still in the experimental phase,” I say.
“Oh, is that so?” he draws himself up stiffly and I see he’s wearing his usual fluorescent green takkies below carefully pressed brown cotton trousers. “May I remind you, Dr. Van Deventer, that you are a Hospital employee and that we are paying for your time here – I demand more clarity as to what that contraption actually is.”
Funny, those shoes, as if part of him rebels against the conformity which covers the rest of him in such staid, traditional, stultified clothing.
As if he would like to run another race, walk another walk? Still, he can be a real dog with a bone, so I decide to level with him, giving him both barrels in the hope he would scoff it away: “A thought box, a neuro-physiological device that both reads and transmits brainwaves via mirrored magnetic pulses, focused over Broca’s area particularly…”
Whatever else he may be, he’s not a stupid man. His face crumples in slow amazement, mixed with growing incredulity. He hesitates and I enjoy his speechlessness, just for the moment it lasts. His features finally settle with a widening realisation in his eyes, but his words are still laced with scepticism. “Ah yes, I remember your joint papers from a few years ago when you were working here – speculative but ambitious stuff indeed, the route to mind-reading.”
I gesture to the Box proudly, somehow strangely wanting him to believe in me.
He raises an eyebrow: “It works?”
Dan steps across, picks the box up and places it carefully back in its container:
“We don’t know, there’s still testing to be done.”
Dr. James laughs, a short fruity chuckle: “Well, have fun trying to get that one through ethics, boys!” He turns to leave, but glances over his shoulder: “One p.m., Dr. van Deventer.”
He leaves quietly, but I can still smell mothballs and stale tobacco.
Dan looks at me, fiddling the securing lever on the container. “He may be an arsehole, but he’s right you know. It’s going to be a job getting this through ethics – given the focus on Broca’s and the importance of language on thought, a dry run with animals may not tell us much.”
I stare back: “How about we two do it?”
He gives a wry smile: “I see there’s also a paper or two coming out about a possible weak link between deep brain stimulation and tumours.”
“Oh,” I say.
He picks the box up and offers it to me.
“What?” I say, cradling it dumbly.
“You work in a place where people are readily available, Marty; I think you can do this – even if it’s off the record, as it were.”
“You serious?”
His cheeks are even tighter and I know that look well – he used to w
ear it when he took his ball home at school, if the game didn’t go his way.
This time though, he is offering me the ball, although he seems to let go with reluctance.
“What’s stopping us?” he shrugs, “The Yanks got away with Tuskegee. This is a whole lot better than that; I’m pretty sure the link with brain tumours is spurious.”
We weigh each other up quietly and I know he’s not going to take the risk to find out just how spurious.
“All right then,” I say, wondering if I’m going to regret this.
“Oh, and Marty?” He cups his chin with his right hand, index finger sliding up alongside his nose. I know that body language from school. “Take bledy good care of – uhhh, our machine, okay?”
I nod and leave with a slight shiver, even though our school years are long behind us.
Chapter 3
Sibusiso’s Learning
I like my history teacher.
She’s a short skinny woman, an Indian, a bright green headscarf hiding her hair, so I assume she’s a Muslim. My mother may not have approved of her then - but that matters little now, for she herself is long gone.
Dr. Wadwalla moves and fidgets quickly in front of us, pointing to the screen above her head at the first lines displayed from our recommended history text.
“Well, teachers to be – what’s wrong with this opening sentence?”
There are about thirty of us crammed into this small room, the floor sloping down towards the wooden lectern. ‘State of the art’ we’ve heard – as good as any white teachers in training get – separate yes, but equal.
Hah.
I like our history teacher because she asks questions, instead of telling us what to think – and she doesn’t hide behind the lectern, like others do. I frown at the words highlighted in red on the overhead screen, but don’t know the answer.
Bongani next to me raises his hand – several others have done so too, but Ms. Wadwalla points to him first.