Thirteen Cents: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series)

by K. Sello Duiker

  voetsek—fuck

  Works Cited

  Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

  Barnard, Rita. Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

  Chapman, Michael. Southern African Literatures. Scottsville: University of Natal Press, 2003. First published 1996 by Longman.

  Cornwell, Gareth, Dirk Klopper, and Craig MacKenzie. The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English Since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

  Duiker, K. Sello. The Hidden Star. Cape Town: Kwela, 2006.

  ———. “Interview with Bafana Khumalo.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 22–23.

  ———. “Interview with Victor Lackay (courtesy of co-author Carl Collison): ‘I’m a Travelling Salesman.’” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 19–21.

  ———. “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 27–30.

  ———. “One Breezy Night Late in November.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 62.

  ———. The Quiet Violence of Dreams. Cape Town: Kwela, 2001.

  ———. Thirteen Cents. Cape Town: David Philip, 2000.

  Ezeliora, Osita. “The Novels of K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 164–75.

  Mphahlele, Es’kia. Es’kia Continued: Literary Appreciation, Education, African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness. Johannesburg: Stainbank, 2004.

  Mzamane, Mbulelo Vizikhungo, ed. Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker. Pretoria: Umgangatho, 2005.

  Ndebele, Njabulo S. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 143–57. Reprinted in Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture, 31–54. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006.

  Oliphant, Andries Walter. “A Changing Topography: Tracing Some Recent Developments in South African Writing.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 230–50.

  Raditlhalo, Sam. “‘The Travelling Salesman’: A Tribute to K. Sello Duiker: 1974–2005.” Feminist Africa 5 (2005): 96–104.

  Rive, Richard. “Dagga-smoker’s Dream.” In Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories, 5–9. Cape Town: David Philip, 1989. First published 1983.

  ———. “Rain.” In Advance, Retreat: Selected Short Stories, 11–19. Cape Town: David Philip, 1989. First published 1983.

  Samuelson, Meg. “Crossing Borders with Words: Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Yvonne Vera.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 196–201.

  Simonsen, Mikkel. “Realising the Gift: K. S. Duiker’s Shades of Identity.” Unpublished Honours paper, University of Stellenbosch, 2004.

  Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Nairobi: Pambazuka, 2011.

  van der Merwe, Annari. “Tribute.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 5–14.

  van Dis, Adriaan. “Tributes.” In Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 11–12.

  Viljoen, Shaun. “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction: Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace,’ District Six and K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams.” English Academy Review 18, no. 1 (2001): 46–53.

  [1] K. Sello Duiker, “One Breezy Night Late in November,” first published in Words Gone Two Soon: A Tribute to Phaswane Mpe and K. Sello Duiker, edited by Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane (Pretoria: Umgangatho, 2005), 62, and reprinted with the kind permission of the Duiker family.

  [2] Samuelson, “Crossing Borders with Words,” 199.

  [3] A number of scholars, and Duiker himself, use lowercase letters when citing the title of this novel, the form given on the cover of the David Philip publication. Others, myself included, have chosen to standardize the title using conventional capitalization.

  [4] In a letter to Mories Römkens, quoted in Annari van der Merwe’s “Tribute” in Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 12–13.

  [5] For Thirteen Cents Duiker won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the Africa Region. For The Quiet Violence of Dreams he was awarded the 2001 Herman Charles Bosman Prize.

  [6] Quoted in van der Merwe, “Tribute,” 12.

  [7] For more on Duiker’s nonracialism, see Shaun Viljoen’s “Non-Racialism Remains a Fiction.”

  [8] “Interview with Victor Lackay,” in Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 20.

  [9] Ezeliora, “The Novels of K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe,” in Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 173.

  [10] For arguments that counter the homogenizing and essentialist view that certain sexualities are “un-African” see various chapters in African Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia Tamale.

  [11] I use the term “hyperrealist” to describe a narrative style that deploys graphic, extraordinary, and gritty language, situations, and imagery in sustained ways to represent and comment on a particular reality.

  [12] Saartjie Baartman was taken from Cape Town to Europe in 1807 and exhibited in Britain and France as the “Hottentot Venus,” a sexual and racial exotic because of the size and shape of her buttocks. Her remains were returned to South Africa in 2006. Many scholars see Baartman’s story as exemplifying colonial fascination with the African woman as the sexualized exotic.

  [13] Duiker, “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker,” in Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 27.

  [14] Ibid., 28.

  [15] “Interview with Bafana Khumalo,” in Mzamane, Words Gone Two Soon, 22.

  [16] “Interview with Victor Lackay,” 19.

  [17] Duiker, “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker,” 27.

  [18] Interview by Mikkel Simonsen, in Simonsen, “Realising the Gift,” 6.

  [19] “Interview with Bafana Khumalo,” 23.

  [20] “Interview with Victor Lackay,” 20.

  [21] Duiker, “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker,” 28.

  [22] Van der Merwe, “Tribute,” 6. Van der Merwe played a seminal role in Duiker’s life as a writer, becoming a friend and a champion of Duiker’s work and taking on responsibility for editing his last novel for publication after his death.

  [23] The term “postapartheid” is widely used to talk about South African literature after 1990, or 1994. Reservations about the appropriateness of the term stem from the fact that while racial discrimination ceased to have any legal basis post-1994 and especially post-1996 (when the new “nonracial” South African constitution was installed), many of the social features of life under apartheid—the encampment of black people in locations in periurban areas, the widespread poverty and unemployment among black people, a dysfunctional school system in black areas—persist to the present. In addition, as Rita Barnard claims about the geographies of South African cities after apartheid, “old divisions are now articulated and justified in new terms” (Apartheid and Beyond, 67). An example of this is the manner in which the rapid gentrification of the inner Cape Town has made it accessible for the wealthier, mainly white populace and forced out and kept out the poorer, mainly nonwhite citizens who were removed from their city homes by apartheid legislation.

  [24] Chapman, Southern African Literatures, xiv.

  [25] Ndebele, “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary,” 31.

  [26] Ibid., 41.

  [27] Oliphant, “A Changing Topography,” 236.

  [28] Cornwell, Klopper, and MacKenzie, The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945, 32.

  [29] Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, 16.

  [30] “Interview with Victor Lackay,” 21.

  [31] “Interview with Bafana Khumalo,” 23.

  [32] Duiker, “‘The Last Word’: Sello Duiker,” 27; interview by Simonsen, 8.

  [33] Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 4.

  [34] In a tribute to Duiker, Sam Raditlhalo gives more speculative detail about the death: “Duiker, who suffered from bipolar affective disorder, committed suicide in a state of depression he at
tributed to his mood-stabilising medication, which he felt was ‘taking too great a toll on his artistic creativity and joie de vivre’ (van der Merwe, 2005). He may have died by his own hand, but there is no doubt that what killed him was a potentially lethal illness that is stigmatised, little understood and often poorly managed.” Raditlhalo, “‘The Travelling Salesman,’” 96.

  [35] Oliphant, “A Changing Topography,” 231.

  [36] Mphalele, Es’kia Continued, 36.

  [37] A comparison with the language of the gangster in short stories by Richard Rive, such as “Dagga-smoker’s Dream” or “Rain,” written in the 1950s, will reveal the extent to which Duiker goes to capture authenticity rather than local color.

  [38] Interview by Simonsen, 11.

  1

  My name is Azure. Ah-zoo-ray. That’s how you say it. My mother gave me that name. It’s the only thing I have left from her.

  I have blue eyes and a dark skin. I’m used to people staring at me, mostly grown-ups. When I was at school children used to beat me up because I had blue eyes. They hated me for it. But now children just take one look at me and then they either say something nasty or smile. But grown-ups, they pierce you with their stare.

  I live alone. The streets of Sea Point are my home. But I’m almost a man, I’m nearly thirteen years old. That means I know where to find food that hasn’t seen too many ants and flies in Camps Bay or Clifton. That is if there aren’t any policemen patrolling the streets. They don’t like us much. Or if I fancy some fruit then I go to the station where the coloured fruit-sellers work. I don’t like them much because they are always yelling at us to move away. Most of them throw away fruit instead of giving it to us. But I’m not stupid. I know that they put funny things in the dustbins where we go scratching for food. I can smell their evil. I know a few kids who are under their evil spell. They make them walk the night spreading their evil. And some of them are so deep into their evil they can change shape. They can become rats or pigeons. Pigeons are also rats, they just have wings. And once you become a rat they make you do ugly things in sewers and in the dark. It’s true. It happens. I’ve seen it.

  But like I said I’m almost a man. I can take care of myself. “Julle fokken mannetjies moet skool toe gaan,” the fruit-sellers yell. It’s easy for them to say that. I lost my parents three years ago. Papa was bad with money and got Mama in trouble. The day they killed him I was away at school. I came back to our shack only to find them in a pool of blood. That was three years ago. That was the last time I went to school.

  I walk a lot. My feet are tough and rough underneath. But I’m clean. Every morning I take a bath at the beach. I wash with sea water. Sometimes I use a sponge or if I can’t find one I use an old rag. It’s just as good. Then I rinse off the sea water at the tap. It’s not that bad washing with cold water. It’s like anything – you get used to it.

  My friend Bafana can’t believe that I saw my dead parents and didn’t freak out. But I told him. I cried and then it was over. No one was going to take care of me. He’s still a laaitie, Bafana, only nine years old and he’s on the streets. And he is naughty. He has a home to go back to in Langa but he chooses to roam the streets. He likes sniffing glue and smoking buttons when he has money. I don’t like that stuff, it makes my head sore. But I like smoking ganja, quite a lot actually. Now Bafana when he smokes glue and buttons he becomes an animal, really. He starts grunting and doesn’t speak much and he messes his pants. So whenever I see him smoking that stuff I beat him. I once beat him so badly he had to go to Groote Schuur to get stitched. I don’t like that stuff. It just does terrible things to your body.

  I sleep in Sea Point near the swimming pool because it’s the safest place to be at night. In town there are too many pimps and gangsters. I don’t want to make my money like them. So during the day I help park cars in Cape Town. It’s not easy work. You have to get there early. Sometimes you have to fight for your spot. The older ones leave us alone, they get all the choice parking spots in the centre of town. It’s like that. I don’t ask questions.

  I help people park cars and wash them if the owners let me. If you wash their car before you ask them most times they just swear at you because you’re a laaitie and they are big. You see it’s like that. That’s how it works here. You must always act like a grown-up. You must speak like them. That means when you speak to a grown-up in town you must look at them in the eyes and use a loud voice because if you speak softly they will swear at you. You must also be clean because grown-ups are always clean. And you must never talk to them like you talk to a laaitie. Like I can’t talk to them the way I talk to Bafana. I must always say “Sir” or “Madam”. It’s like saying “Magents” except it’s for grown-ups. And when I can remember I say “please” and “thank you”. Those two words are like magic, my secret. They’ve made me nice money every time I used them with a smile.

  I work near a takeaway shop called Subway. On a good day I can make enough money to buy half a loaf of white bread with chips and Coke and still have two rands left over to buy a stop from Liesel who stays under the bridge.

  She’s the only grown-up I trust because she asks me for money and always pays me back a week later. I also like her because she let me see how a woman looks like naked. She doesn’t tell lies, Liesel, not like the other people who stay under the bridge. All the skollies, gangsters and drunks with phuza-face also stay there.

  Poor Liesel. I know what she does to make money. It’s not easy. That’s why I never ask her about it. And when she has a bruise or a cut under her lip I don’t say anything. I just pretend that things are like always, the same. We talk about kwaito and whether the Rasta who brings her stop will get good stuff like Malawi gold or Mpondo and we talk about other things. I like her a lot but she’s not my cherrie. She’s got her own outie. I don’t like him much. He’s a member of the Hard Livings gang.

  2

  Morning creeps in slowly. Bafana sleeps curled in a half-moon beside me. I get up to take a pee. I rub my eyes and let out a yawn as I piss. We sleep at the far corner of the beach. Above us is the swimming pool. It is too early for the public toilets to be open so I go a little further up the beach and do my business near a drain. Deep orange clouds cover the sky. Seagulls fly by and cry.

  “Bafana, son, get up, we need to get breakfast.” I poke him. “Bafana . . . Bafana.”

  I go on like this for about five minutes before he gets up.

  “Wena, you must stop taking those stupid drugs. They are fucking you up. Look at you, you can’t even get up. You’re lucky it’s me. Somebody will think you’re dead.”

  He moans and looks at me with a skew face.

  “I’m hungry,” he mumbles.

  “Ja, shuddup, you know what you have to do.”

  “Wena, and your stupid rules.”

  I slap the back of his head and he clicks his tongue at me.

  “The sun is already out, hurry up. I’m also hungry.”

  We take off our clothes and go towards the water only dressed in our shorts.

  “Don’t make me drag you in there, son, we go through this every morning.”

  “Yessus! Who said I have to wash every day?”

  “Hey voetsek! Don’t give me shit. You know my rules. If you want to stay with me you have to wash. Now fuck off,” I say and push him into the water.

  He shrieks.

  “Thula, man. People are still sleeping. This isn’t town.”

  I only go in up to my ankles and watch him scrubbing with a cloth.

  “Do it properly,” I warn him.

  “Eish maar, wena.”

  After a while I let him go out and rinse off at the tap. He sits on a rock and dries off in the sun while I bathe. I think about all the things I plan to do today while I wash. My eyes sting from the salt water.

  After washing we get dressed and go up Main Road. I know a woman who works at a restaurant called La Perla. She usually leaves leftovers for us near a bush. I’m the only one who gets the food be
cause I don’t trust Bafana. He’s still a laaitie and sometimes he gets desperate when he’s on his stupid drugs. I’ve worked too hard to see someone mess up a regular meal for me. She’s nice, the auntie who gets the food for me. Her name is Joyce but she likes me to call her Auntie. She says I remind her of her son in Lichtenburg. Anyway, in exchange for the meal she sends me to the shop to do her small groceries. Or sometimes she sends me to the Post Office or she gives me money to buy her Die Burger. There’s nothing for mahala with grown-ups. You always have to do something in return. But I don’t mind because Joyce is nice.

  We sit on a balcony overlooking the pool and eat. Joyce always packs the food into those McDonald’s plastic things and gives us spoons. We watch the morning swimmers do their lengths. As always the pool is a clear blue-sky colour. I love to swim and I’m dying to swim in that pool. But six bucks is a lot of money and you have to have a towel.

  “We need to make some baksheesh today,” Bafana finally says after he’s had enough to eat.

  “Ja, ja. What do you plan on doing?”

  “But I thought we’re a team.”

  “Voetsek! Don’t talk rubbish. You do this every day. When are you going to get it into your head that I’m not your mother? I’m only doing you a favour by letting you sleep by me. You know what would happen to you otherwise. You and your stupid drugs. Now you want me to work with you so you can buy your stupid drugs. You’re full of kak. Fuck off!” I push him and walk off towards the park and leave him to fend for himself.

  I’m not his father, I say to myself. That laaitie is getting under my armpit, under my soft spot. I mustn’t let that happen, I tell myself. I’ve seen too many kids die and disappear. There’s no point in getting too close. Just now he gets an overdose from his stupid drugs. And then what? Now I must walk around crying because this stupid boy who has a home ran away to kill himself with drugs. I’m not stupid, man. If he wants to do grown-up things then I must leave him. He wants to play with fire, let him.