by Arushi Raina
“Not me. Offer that gentleman some,” I said, waving my hand in Joubert’s direction. Then I walked away.
Megan’s dress was soft against my hands. I leaned my head against hers, but she tipped her head back. Joubert stood holding his drink, watching me.
Thirteen
Zanele
I went out with the drinks, offering them to Jack, the Afrikaaner, Jack’s father. Jack waved me off, without looking at me. I went back inside, finished cleaning the kitchen floor, the living room and the dishes. Mama was still doing the glasses.
“Mama,” I said. “I’m going back.” I put my head against her strong broad back and my arms around her. I was letting her stay here, alone.
“Careful with the buses,” she said, putting her hand briefly over mine.
Jack
“So are you going to tell me?” Megan asked.
“Tell you what?”
“What was going on with Oliver’s dad? And what’s been going on with you these last few weeks? That’s why I’m letting you dance with me.”
Ricky was staring at Megan and me. He now had an arm around one of the girls who had gone to Rodean with Megan, a girl from Wits with a boyish haircut. As I watched, she shook him off.
“It’s a good sign when a girl who’s about to dump you still asks questions.”
“You want it to end this way?”
“Worked so hard to get you to go out with me—”
“Very hard.”
“Now this.”
“Hmm.”
I watched Joubert dancing with my mother. Then the light went off in the kitchen, and there was only Lillian’s silhouette at the window in the maid’s quarters.
“I’m sorry. I have to go now,” I said.
“You do.”
I walked past the slide and swings, to the porch. Trays of fruit had been left out, the outer skins of apricots and nectarines bruised by the afternoon cold.
I drove to the rank, honked when I saw her. I rolled down the window.
“The police know,” I said. “The Afrikaaner at the party is a colonel. Colonel Joubert.”
“Then we shouldn’t be seen together.” She continued walking.
“He’s dancing right now, busy. Get in. We’ll make a plan.”
She smiled strangely, got in the car. I pulled out and started driving her home.
“He doesn’t know it’s you,” I said. “That’s why I was like that with the drinks. And my mother was drunk.”
“Please. Let us not talk about that.”
“Look—”
“This Oxford University. You’re going.”
“You said—”
“I looked at all your notes. Your application. Don’t let anyone stop you from doing what you want. If Joubert is threatening you, give him what he wants so that you can do what you want. That’s what I would do.”
“You’re not serious.” I braked a few streets away from her shack.
“How often, Jack, do I joke?”
“And what will you do then?” I said.
She put her head against my shoulder, and laughed.
“Why do you say things like that?” I said.
“I’m being honest.”
She kissed my cheek. Then she got out of the car.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
She turned and started walking toward her shack. Her back straight in her cheap cotton uniform. I imagined her bare back in the red shebeen dress.
Zanele
I walked away without turning around in case he was waiting for me to go back to him. He was patient.
In the end, he was a mlungu. They came and they went. So what did I expect?
But Jack wasn’t afraid of apologizing—oh no, he would apologize all day long if that got him what he wanted.
I was cold. I had left my shawl and Mama behind. That was a mistake. I should have waited for Mama even though she hadn’t asked me to. Instead of going home, I walked to the Orlando Power Station. The night was black—few streetlights here in Soweto, even now, after the government promised us electricity. And here and there, the calls of children, women and men from the shebeen. Somewhere out there, Masi and the rest were bent over, planning.
No lights and no street names, but I knew where I was going. I knew from years of walking with my hand in Baba’s, in Mama’s, in Mankwe’s.
I walked. I saw a few men with their umqombothi, but they didn’t see me. I thought of Professor. The new grass over his grave. Mankwe’s wedding ring in tissue paper. I was standing at the edge of the township now, on the hill between the power station and the shacks. The station was still there, untouched. Phelele was gone. Billy was gone in his own way. And Masi and the rest of us were left behind.
The sky turned grey. The power stations were still, fat black shapes against the morning light. It would be a peaceful protest, and then a speech at the stadium. The government would just ignore it. I told myself all these things, but standing, looking down over Soweto, I felt like I was looking at the township for the last time.
I took the maid’s cap off my head and threw it. It floated in the air for a few seconds then dropped onto a mound of mining waste. Wind blew the dust into my face. It was sharp and bitter in my mouth.
I walked back. Morning was coming, and it seemed as if I’d waited for this a long, long time—longer even than I’d been alive. I saw smoke rise from the shacks. Far off, the windows in the city glinted. The barking of dogs.
The children slapped paint on the cardboard so that it spattered on the ground, rose in small sprays in the air. The paint smelled of plastic and cut through the cold morning. I picked up a sawed-off piece of a door that said Away With Bantu Education, and carried it outside. The younger children followed me toward assembly, laughing and joking. I looked at the hundreds of them across the playground—a wave of bobbing heads. Like before a birthday party. But no cake.
No sign of the principal, the teachers. At least at our school they knew not to come. Good.
At the front, right before the gate that led out of the school, was Masi.
I felt the crowd pressing closer to him. Maybe they did because of his handsome face, his jokes, the way he made you feel that you, alone, were important. I walked toward him—he held his hands, palms out, trying to stop us.
I wondered why I’d never wanted him, wanted Jack instead. A mlungu with a plane ticket to England—rolling green hills, the land of mlungus.
Masi started singing. Masibulele ku Jesu, ngokuba wasifela. It was the song we always had to sing for assembly, about praising Jesus because he died for us. I started singing with him. And then others did too—the song felt different now, charged with something. Masi had found something in it that we hadn’t seen before.
Then Masi said: “One more song, just one.” People laughed, yelled. They waved placards over their thin arms, hitting each other.
And then he started singing Nkosi S’ikelele.
Vusi came next to me, smiled. “Good choice,” he said. He put his fist on his chest, I did the same. In front of us, Masi raised his fist. The crowd followed, with their fists and then their placards, yelling “Amandla.” Quietly, the teachers had joined us. Mr Mamphile had a smile on his face and the principal clapped slowly.
Then Masi told us to follow him.
We went out of the gate and onto the road. The street was empty, waiting for us. And it was a little bit like the beginning of a party, with the kids streaming out of the gate, the sound of their voices loud and clear in the crisp morning air.
When we crowded into Thesele High School, we knew they were not ready for us. Some of the teachers there stood outside, looking terrified, some angry. Vusi grabbed my arm as students pushed past us.
“We can’t let them get a message out to the superintendent—you understand?”
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br /> “You get the tires.” I opened my bag, saw the tip of the screwdriver glinting in it, and handed it to Vusi. Then I pushed past people and went around the back of the school, past the outdoor toilet, to the principal’s office. The window looked onto a bare desk and the only telephone in the building. I had never broken a window before with my hand, but it shattered easily against my knuckles. I didn’t hear the sound it made.
I climbed through the window, my school shoes scuffing against the bricks. I fell in on my back. I rolled over and got up. I shuffled through the desk. All the stationery had been laid out carefully in the drawer. I took out the scissors, found the black wire that connected the phone to the socket. Then I cut it.
I put the scissors back on the desk as the door opened and the principal came in. He picked up the receiver, started dialing. I rose slowly from behind the desk, holding out the cut wires.
“Sorry,” I said. “Operator not available. The march won’t be called off by a phone call to your mlungu superintendent.”
As he reached out, his bulky body stretching over the desk, I climbed back out of the window into the crowd.
Our steps made sharp cracking sounds against the gravel of the road. People stopped on the street to stare at us. Cars stopped because the street was blocked now. We tapped their windows, told them to take another route. Some of them waved, shouted with us. Vusi was silent next to me. He was worried. Any moment the police could come.
When we crossed Mofolo Park, we saw the students from Naledi School, with Winston and Tina in front, her curls bouncing as she ran, children hanging on to her hands, her legs, everywhere. The students from Naledi didn’t slow down as they came. We didn’t either. When they ran into us, we hit and scraped each other until we swelled over the whole street right up to the doorsteps.
The noise and anger of the students was thick. They followed us, we carried them. Masi, Vusi and I.
“Do you feel it?” Vusi asked me.
I did.
Thabo
“Thabo, look.”
The Chevrolet Impala was old, but the man who owned it kept it nice. I had been eyeing it for some time, since before I became a tsotsi.
We were in a side street in Orlando West, the boys and I. I was teaching them how to steal cars, and this was an easy one. But Thulani, the smaller boy, was always distracted. I’d picked an easy target in case he made mistakes.
“Nkosi, hurry, smash the window,” I told the older one.
The boy got off the roof of the car and found a stone. He tapped the window with it.
“Eish, Nkosi,” I said. “That is not how you break a window.”
That was when I saw what Thulani had been staring at: school blazers, maybe three hundred, headed this way. I got up on the car roof, getting my sleeves dirty.
Nkosi finally broke the glass and slipped inside. Thulani got in too. The students were waving signs, and more and more people were joining them, random street boys. I swore under my breath and slipped off the car roof. I pushed the boy out of the car seat and took the screwdriver from him, popping the ignition. It was too late. The old man had come out of his shop. He started shouting, waving his stick around.
I pushed the accelerator, and luckily the engine started. The old man ran after us, calling me dog, tsotsi, whatever he could think of. But he was left behind.
In the back seat, the boys cheered. I turned the radio on and the boys sang over it, loud. “Thula wena,” I told them. I switched it off. “No need to celebrate. I was the one who stole the car. Now pay attention. We’re going to drive into a riot.”
They kept quiet as I drove the car toward the swarm of people. I stuck my head out of the broken window, and I waited for the crowd to reach us. But then I realized they would never reach us, because across the bridge, in six white vans, the abo gata were coming. I accelerated, knowing that I would be too late.
“Sisi Zanele is in there?” Thulani asked as we waited for a light to turn green.
The silence hung, Nkosi slapped him. “He will moer you if you say her . . .”
I said nothing and cut past the red light.
Zanele
When we came to the bridge, we started tripping over each other. The placards ahead of me stopped, even though this was not a stop that we had planned, even though there didn’t seem to be any cars blocking our way.
A hiss went through the crowd, which became a word that travelled down to me. Police. I lost Vusi as he ran ahead to find out if it was true. I didn’t see him again.
Up ahead, Masi climbed up on the back of a truck. “We are not going to fight them,” he said. “Just be calm.”
Police.
Minutes passed and they didn’t come. We started pushing each other, trying to go forward. Winston, the boy from Naledi, shouted, “Where’s your police, eh, Masi?” A laugh went through the crowd.
Then we heard the sirens, the sound of rubber scraping road—three vans and four police cars. They formed into a line. The policemen got out, in khaki, with their dogs. The dogs, like their handlers, formed still shadows in the afternoon light.
It was their thick bodies, their dogs and their cars between Orlando Stadium and us. I elbowed students to get to the front, crushing placards under my feet. We came closer and closer to them.
“Stand back!” a policeman shouted through a loudspeaker. He was middle aged, with thick lines under his eyes and near his mouth. He tried it again in Zulu. “Kahle!” Then added that he was “serious.”
I laughed at his attempt at Zulu. Some of the kids behind me started laughing too. The dogs strained on their leashes. Still, we came closer. The line of policemen looked like it was going to break.
A policeman with a child’s face and a thin red beard stood opposite me, his fingers adjusting and re-adjusting on his gun. In a few seconds, I would be at his throat.
Then one of them threw something into the crowd, tossing it high above my head. Tear gas. Still we came at them.
A dog came loose from a leash and charged at us. Someone took a rock and threw it at the dog. And then others did too.
That’s when the policeman with the red beard decided to shoot.
Someone shouted, and then we were all shouting. We found stones near our feet and threw them. More shots—we scattered, far and wide into side streets, slamming into shop fronts.
As I ran, I found small hands, and so I dragged them with me into an opening between two shops. I pressed their heads into the ground as more shots rang out. Students kept throwing stones. “Stop throwing,” I screamed. “Stop throwing.” My voice was gone, broken. A boy fell in front of me. Someone picked him up. Still the shots came. The boy was picked up by his friend. His blood fell onto the ground. A girl ran next to him, crying.
The children watched me with their large eyes.
I had not expected them to shoot us. I did not.
The violence took me back to the first days of drawing up plans with Billy, plans to bomb the tower. Back through all that had happened up to this moment.
I gripped the children’s small bodies closer to me. The smoke, sweat, and the acrid taste of tear gas in my throat.
Fourteen
Meena
“Stop the car,” I said. “Here.”
Prinesh, boasting about how he would soon get his own car, turned to look at me. “You’re feeling sick?”
“No. Let me out here.”
“What about school?” Krishni said.
“Make up an excuse for me.” I gave her a fake smile, like Zanele, shut the car door and hurried toward the rank.
I folded my body into a seat and waited for the bus to fill up. A woman squeezed in next to me, something haggard, crazy in her face.
Halfway to Soweto, she said, “They’re shooting our babies.” Her mouth kept opening and closing after that, and no sound came out.
Zane
le
I heard the police drive away before I stood up.
“Stay close and be quiet,” I told the children. We ran for cover behind a line of shops along the narrow street. It was strangely quiet, but I heard something scrape against the rubbish bins behind me. Someone was following us.
“Stop,” I hissed. I looked behind the children, for a gun, a policeman, or a dog. Then someone turned me against the wall and held a knife at my throat. The children stopped and picked up stones.
“Don’t,” I shouted.
“Wise.” I recognized the voice. He turned me around. It was Winston from Naledi, with blood on his face, his arm limp, under his shirt. “You brought the police here, with their dogs and the guns, sisi Zanele? This was part of your plan?”
“What? No.”
“Someone warned the abo gata. How come they came so quick?”
“I don’t know. Let me go.”
He dropped me. I fell to the ground holding my throat.
“How do I know you didn’t call them?”
“You can’t know,” Winston said. He stared at the children. “So what’s your plan?”
“We need to get them home.”
“With bullets in their bodies?” he asked. “Come on.” He leaned down. My uniform grazed his bloodied clothes.
I didn’t ask him where his friend Tina was.
“Regina Mundi,” I said. “They won’t shoot us in a church.”
Winston cocked his head. “Maybe,” he said, gesturing me to follow.
So I did. Behind me the children followed.
Fifteen
Meena
Bottles were being thrown through the clinic windows by children in school uniforms and boys in cheap suits. Tsotsis, but the fake kind. Some children were trying to stop them. They held hands, and their bodies circled around the clinic. I smelled smoke. Something was on fire.
Behind me, the crazed woman held onto my wrist and stared at the clinic. Zanele had told me something had been planned for today. And it had gone wrong.