by Miller
‘I never fought unless I had to,’ he said. ‘But when I did I made sure I klapped them proper.’ Javas snapped his fingers through the air to indicate the severity. ‘People have to know. Everyone must know.’
It was terrible, he said. The city. Life was dark and dangerous and filled with the stink of humanity. ‘Jozi is fucked. If you gonna survive, you have to become fucked too. Crazy like the city. Otherwise you go home.’ Eventually, though, once his credentials as a lethal cunt had been established, most of the hard work was done via inference. ‘The phone is your most powerful weapon. Once you have created the fear, you keep it, you own it, with the phone. Late night. Early morning. Lunchtime is worst. People are very afraid at lunchtime.’
We were like Out of Africa gone to Mars. Me, Meryl Streep, the confused Euro observing the locals, my impassioned white skin glowing while my mind failed. I was stretching, reaching hard to follow Javas’s story and his descriptions of his transition into Jozi life, constantly aware of the subtleties I had missed, and was still missing. Gerald’s and Andile’s – and, to a lesser extent, Teboho’s – laughs and clucks echoed tellingly. I didn’t have the experience or the language to appreciate the full scope of Javas’s humour, nor the true darkness of his venture.
But I could imagine.
And in my imagining, my perception of Javas, and of the people I was living with, morphed. I now saw the deeper lines on his face, the etchings of a man who had truly travelled. I also suddenly saw the lean muscle beneath his clothing. I watched the way he moved and realised the economy of his motion. Javas was a big guy. Javas was a tough guy.
And I had never noticed.
Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility. As he released the last parts of his history, I began to see Javas himself as a work of African art. A fluid, changeable and dynamic form. A self-sculpture. A muscled metaphor for everything that is beautiful and fucked up on the road from Harare.
Javas kept rolling. ‘What I learned is that there is only fashion. No one decides on their own whether they like art or not. They are taken to art by the winds, they are told what it is, and what it’s worth, in whispers.’
Javas told a good story. He also knew how to make a print, having been trained in the art of spoon printing by a benevolent teacher in his early childhood. A few years into his stint as city knee-breaker, he began an affair with a Zulu girl of a similar age, an artist who had moved through the Jozi system, studying at UJ and then going on to be mentored by bigger names at bigger venues.
Thus the artist life of Javas Khumalo was born. Funded by his knee-breaker savings, Javas’s career followed a remarkable upward curve. A few months into producing cheap but innately sellable prints, he took a studio space in the inner city and began welding scrap metal together, creating massive, demonic, disturbing figures. Towering events really, more than sculptures.
‘Remarkable for their combination of size and form, for their ability to both mimic and reflect the fluidity of African life,’ said Andile.
‘She’s quoting a brochure,’ Javas added. To hear him tell it, his works were simply collections of scrap metal welded into each other and given names, stories, faces – and a big fucking selling price.
Gangster connections and art connections were not as mutually exclusive as one might think. Kentridges and Makamos and Sterns and Ngobenis and Catherines were always in underground circulation, alongside diamonds and gold, sewage tenders and IT systems, and teenage girls from Thailand or Swaziland. Art, as well as the influence and fame it evoked, was a sought-after commodity. Above ground and underneath.
Javas’s connections dovetailed powerfully. The girlfriend’s crowd of teachers and mentors and buyers were awfully impressed. The zing of hard gangster money reinforced the magic, creating an elixir of success, excitement and ego. Men from across the continent, afro mamas in dashikis, tight young girlfriends in super-high heels. The sunglasses and the BMWs and the pink shirts. His exhibitions created the slippery, high-tension buzz that advertising people dream of and that art buyers are powerless to resist.
And so the drug dealers chatted smoothly to the professors, who rubbed shoulders with politicians and DJs, and the hype grew and the prices went up and the girlfriend was overshadowed and outstripped by her find: Javas Khumalo, game ranger turned refugee turned debt collector and club bouncer turned artist turned sculptor. Javas was moving his pieces for well over thirty million each when …
When …
He shrugged and threw a log onto the fire.
When I actually saw Javas’s sculptures, deeper dimensions emerged. Despite his story, even recognising and respecting his claim of being the incidental recipient of the winds-of-art fate, there was magnificence. The sculptures towered six metres in the air. The heads – sometimes made of engine cylinders or even complete car radiators – balanced easily on top of tortured metal bodies twisted with movement and potential. Tractor wheels and driveshafts and bearings and God knows what else combined to create an immense parody of humankind. Monstrous, delicately balanced, vulnerable giants on their last legs, reaching out for hope, for stability, for one last step before the fall.
I saw Andile’s art too, in later months, and it was more technically accomplished, more thoughtful and nuanced. But it was small and usual and, ultimately, expected. A1 Fabrianos have been lining up, side by side, across Africa for generations. Her work was simply unable to match Javas’s brute force. His ambition. I wished that I could have seen just one of his events, could have just once been in the city to witness his giants surrounded by the cloying ambition of man perfume and chequebooks.
And that, in a three-hour session of beer and fire, laughter and complete seriousness, was Javas’s story. At the end, deep into the night, when we finally dragged ourselves off to our respective lodge beds, I was overcome by the desire to hug him. To embrace him. To enfold him in my arms.
And I did.
CHAPTER 33
My school name
We spent the next two days roaming the park in the Hummer, braaiing meat and eating it, opening gates, looking at game and swapping positions. It was, structurally speaking, a classic Kruger Park trip.
After the enlightenment of his life story, Javas was good company. Not only did we pick up on many of the personal threads he’d let loose, but he was also a mine of wildlife information. He would force us to get out of the vehicle and make friends with a zebra, a buck and even an elephant – none of whom cared about our presence. He explained the details. What they wanted to eat, who they wanted to fuck and when, spoors and tracks.
We drove up from Skakuza through Letaba, Satara, Olifants and up to Pafuri, the dry north. Every time we opened a gate it felt like a grand, important action. We did it ceremoniously, in recognition of our fundamental inversion of the order of things. Often we weren’t opening much at all. The bigger gates were really just booms fronting empty guard huts. We swung them nonetheless.
Once we reached the top of the park we contemplated keeping going, up through Zim. Suddenly Lillian’s let’s-drive-through-Africa vibe didn’t seem that weird. There was easy fuel wherever we went, and there we were on the border of Zim with no problems whatsoever.
Gerald nixed the idea. ‘Risk,’ he said. ‘The odds are wrong. We make decisions as a group so we all understand what’s happening. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest. Which would be bad for us. Risk.’
And that was that.
Still, it was enticing. Point north and vok voort. I couldn’t quite shake the idea, even as we turned back south.
We took a lot of pictures.* Well, Andile did. She wanted them for her paintings – source material and such. It wasn’t something I had considered before the trip, but on the occasions I had a camera in my hands I shot with relish. I realised months later, looking over my animal photos, that I had developed the habit of always positioning someone in a far corner
of the frame, nearly, but not quite, out of the shot. Just a hint, the tiniest hint, of humanity.
We only took one full-group picture, tourist style. Andile balanced the camera on a table and the five of us linked arms and beamed at the lens like we were Germans. I still have that shot now, pinned up on my wall. We all look so young. Young and bedraggled and bush dirty. My top lip had slipped up in the heat of the moment to reveal my guillotine, making me appear the most hobo-like of us all. Andile looks alarmingly young in that shot – just a girl really, just coming into the world. And beautiful in the way only the young can be.
Her own story slipped out piece by piece, in the shadow of Javas’s epic. Even at the end of our excursion I saw her within the context of him, although by then I had begun to perceive the outer edges of her shape.
I only truly considered Andile and her trajectory once Javas had shocked me with his. Before, I simply perceived them as the twins. As a singular entity. I was comfortable with them sitting neatly in the middle distance of my consciousness. I’m still not sure whether I was the only one to be so slow, so self-obsessed and wrapped up in my own ideas, or whether the rest also suffered from a similar blinkered state. I remember asking Gerald at the time how much he had known of Javas’s story. He gave me the Gerald sigh and beady eye and said, ‘I am the same. I have two names. Gerald is my school name. My real name is Mudyathlari. I have also travelled and disappeared. Javas’s story is mine. It’s just that he had borders and passports.’
I retreated, suitably scolded, and still unclear. I turned to Tebza, who said he had suspected and/or surmised the basics without ever knowing the details and that I should really track down this incredibly racist yet accurate book by some colonist who had mapped the different types of sub-Saharan African races by facial type.
Andile grew up a Zulu girl in a Zulu world. She went to school (her school name was Prudence, and she ditched it age ten) and dodged the boys until she found one she liked. She ran the family shop – a small spaza – through her teens and was set to marry when the boy was killed in a car accident. Shattered by the loss, by the idea of loss, by the suddenness and severity of the change, Andile packed her bags.
Washed up on the concrete shores, she remembered art. At school, aside from being successful in dating that boy, that one single boy, she had been pretty good at sketching. She picked up her pencil and in those crucial three months after beaching at a friend’s place in Vosloo, those months when you’ll take anything, do anything, be anything, she stumbled across an arts college. The tutors noticed a freedom in her lines and she lucked into a full three-year sponsorship, stipend and all. After years of dutiful attention, after months of wracking grief, after weeks of urban confusion, she was riding at a particular pace in a particular direction, and it all seemed to make sense, like someone had planned it.
The art training led to graduation, with no particular honour. Andile ended up running the office of the NGO that had trained her. She managed student stipends and training programmes, secured funding for arts events and herded the artists together for whatever was required. ‘I am skilled in chowing the budget’ was her sardonic summation. ‘I know how to eat. And how others eat. I understand the shipping margins for arts fairs. I know how to overbook hotels.’
It was the inflections, the small hand movements, the gestures and flickers of emphasis that did the real telling. The eyes flashing, sometimes tearing up. A belly laugh. I began to try – while listening to her and following her, while starting to paint my own pictures of her life in KwaZulu, then Vosloo, then the city – to seriously piece it together. Her story, like Javas’s and Gerald’s, was that of the refugee.
I too had some of the refugee in me, although the troubles I had fled through my life were largely of my own making. Nonetheless, I had perfected an ability to stay away from the core of things, to float myself off, slightly to the left, keeping as silent as possible and as participative as necessary.
Artists could never, would never, harm anybody. They’re too busy painting. Same with ad drunks. They might be a bit useless at functional tasks, they may break things (small objects, precious objects, door handles, car accessories, and such), but they’re too pissed to get seriously involved in anything.
While considering Andile, I pondered how I was viewed, and how the others perceived me. I had had few conversations of this sort with anyone other than Tebza. The usual chatter and basic information sharing, of course, but I could recall precious few occasions where I had told my story with my hands and my heart, like Andile and Javas had done.
And then, of course, the bigger questions. Had my decades of retreat and personal isolation rendered these skills void in me? Was my heart rusted shut? Was my tongue beyond any meaningful redemption? Could it even tell what needed to be told?
For the moment, the questions were moot. No one had asked for my story yet. Not that story.
We headed back to Jozi enriched, enlivened and imbued with a sense of movement, with notions of hope, change and progression.
‘It makes me think,’ said Andile as we bulleted down the N4 in the Hummer, chasing Javas and Tebza and Gerald as they led us home in the Toyota, ‘that anything is possible. That maybe we’re hiding in Jozi. We should move. We could move, if we wanted to. We could go anywhere we liked. Why not move up here? Even if there aren’t people, there’s places out there, nè?’
I agreed. I imagined. The roadside swept past at pace, the smokestacks on the left horizon teasing with the suggestion of utility, power, progression.
CHAPTER 34
Hungover, shamed troops
Tebza had finally delivered. Suddenly we had a WAN that covered three square kilometres. Not just any WAN, but one that locked into the IP address for the transmission-paint receptors. We were able to talk to the walls, to command and broadcast. In time, we would be able to create interfaces.
The WAN gave us partial drone ability – just enough to show how distant the real deal was, and would forever be. Without a satellite link the essential function of the drones was void. Images couldn’t be fed back to the controls, and so the things could never be sent out of human sight. They were little more than toys. Even if they could have ventured beyond us, we would never be able to see what they saw. They would be out there seeking, seeing, assessing all on their own.
Still, the WAN allowed Tebza to control a drone from a laptop hooked up to something akin to a PA system mixing desk, out of which extended a joystick. Using a combination of wireless signals and radio frequencies that was beyond our understanding, he gave us sight control over the planes, which he set to shoot video and store on the internal hard drive. Long after the little brown bullets were parked back next to us, we all pored over the laptop, peering hopefully into a video stream of vacant land.
We climbed the St John’s tower for the best view and reach, and flew the things for days. We flew them into trees and buildings, hovered them incessantly in fear of landing and then crashed them repeatedly in the attempt to bring them down.
The drones, secured from the Waterkloof Airforce Base, were the size of small seagulls. Some were even as small as large insects. They were observation devices and lacked guns and firepower, a fact which disappointed the boys but, Tebza educated us, at least ensured we would receive decent-quality video. You can only fit so much equipment onto a seagull.
It was thrilling, getting those things into the air and then letting them run through the blue. Infused in the thrill was the idea of our own flight, and thus it was Lillian who bounced and bobbed and squeaked with the most force. ‘I’m telling you!’ she shouted into the air above the clock tower, American fist raised. ‘I’m telling you, world! We will fly! We will not be beaten!’
‘Just focus, dear.’ Tebza reached out to steady her grip on the joystick, then retracted, his hand hovering nervously. ‘We don’t have an endless supply.’
Andile laid her body carefully on the tower’s thin stone ledge, suntanning, hands behind head, ignoring t
he sheer drop. ‘This blue sky,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘The sky has just gone mal blue. Crazy blue. Imagine how blue it would be, to be a drone, floating in the sea, just you, just me.’ She rapped thoughtlessly, stumbling onto a hidden beat. ‘Baby, it’s life, baby, it’s a bee, it’s the drone, it’s you, it’s me, free in the deep blue sea …’
Lillian plunged to the right, the joystick pulling her body down as the drone flipped up in the sky, lost itself and started to crash. She yelled theatrically and thrust the stick in six different directions. The drone, tiny insect, dropped helpless onto the rugby field. ‘Wait, I’ll get it!’ she yelled and bolted down the stairs. We watched her shifting across the turf, lost in the simple thrill of the search.
‘I’m having a feeling,’ said Gerald carefully, ‘that this is the beginning of something.’
Drones aside, there was much debate around what use to make of our new ability, which, although exciting, was not immediately practical. Eventually we settled on painting the corner façade of the St John’s building, the bit overlooking Houghton Drive. We did a bad job, just a straight up-and-down lashing of the dull brown, but it was enough. After a week of energy and effort, we stood proudly below a twelve-metre-wide and thirty-metre-high rotating slide show. After we grew bored with pictures of ourselves, Tebza loaded up a static, shimmering South African flag and it sat there, humble during the day, insanely colourful and neon at night. It was, we decided, important. It marked our presence. At night, the neon could be seen from Tshwane.
‘You’d swear by the size of the thing,’ said Andile, ‘that we would be thousands.’