The Mandela Plot

by Kenneth Bonert

  Shaolin walks out onto the concrete and waves me to follow. There’s a spread tarpaulin on the other side, some folded chairs lying next to it. One of the kids picks up two chairs and sets them up on the concrete. “It’s nice here at night,” Shaolin is saying. “We can look at the lights there where they have electricity. But they don’t give us electricity. In here it’s a dark city. Invisible city—what they want.” He smiles at me. “We come up here and have nice braais some of the times.” He points to the tarp and everyone laughs except for me. I don’t get what’s funny about a braai, we have one every Sunday. Kosher steaks and chops over charcoal. “Sit down,” he says and I take a seat on one chair while he settles on the other, crossing his legs. He opens a striped pack of Stimorol chewing gum and tips three of the blue tablets onto his tongue. He chews for a while, then offers me the pack. “No, thank you,” I say.

  “I like fresh breath,” says Shaolin. He scratches behind one ear then rests his cheek on his fist. “You are with Annie—you wants to be in the Struggle, the Movement . . . yuh?” I don’t say a word. “Where are you from?” Shaolin asks.

  “Greenside.”

  “Greenside. I know Greenside. Trees. So much green trees. We don’t have any trees here like that, nothing was planted for us in Jules.” He folds his arms, puts his chin onto his chest so his chewing makes him look like he’s nodding, agreeing with himself. “No, they don’t give to us any trees. Me, I used to think that is our . . . deprivement. But now when I look and I see these no-trees, I am thinking good. Because—know why?—I was in the Germany, Eastern Germany. Yes—you surprise?—yes, for trainings. I was in Berlin, in Dresden, in Potsdam. I was in Ukraine also, Odessa and Sevastopol. Receiving my military trainings and qualifications. Now, the fust time when I saw the forests over there, and the snows, and all the green-green trees, so many, I said I can’t believe. They have the same trees as Joburg. Before, I didn’t understand. Then I saw those trees and I grasped it, how when they came here, the whites, the Europeans, they put thousands and even millions of their own kinds of trees into our soil in order to make it like where they are coming from. To take this place and convert it to something else that is like their homes. Because our people, we never had trees before like these kinds of big, thirsty trees, so many, and they are none of them African. Not one. But here, here around Julius—look around, look, it is perfect the same how it was originally. The same hills, the same vegetations. It is not been changed. You see, they try to punish us with no trees but in fact they have done to us the favour. Here it is my home one hundred per cent, and me I am from here one hundred per cent, and here is still the real Africa, one hundred per cent, and me I am the real African. So we are proud to be in Julius. You understand?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Hear my words,” he says. “The one who gives the orders is not that police captain they say who is in charge. This Oberholzer. Oh no, no. But you see, me”—he thumbs his chest—“I am the real commandante of Julius Caesar township. The only one. And I am say for you, this place is our place. We are Young Lions of the Amagabane, the Comrades. This is our zone. We are the ones who have make the Mzabalazo, the liberation war, and we are victorious. Now these other regime military can come in and drive around and do some raids but they go out the same way every night. We spit on their curfew. We are the law here, the justice who is ruling the people. It is our street committees, our people’s courts. Not them. We had police living here before ’eighty-five, what we say in Xhosa was the Isiqalo—the Beginning. Since then we the people judged them and executed them by means of firebombings. We brought down their homes on their heads. We finished the police station. No, we do not tolerate traitor police families here in Jules, my area of control. The collaborators and the impimpis, informers, must all die. They can bring the army all day, put emergency state all day, but we the people are the only rulers of Julius township. It is our control. You see?”

  “Yes,” I say, and something Annie told me in the Olden Room about Mandela floats through my mind then, that word legitimacy.

  “They are the thesis,” Shaolin is saying. “We are the anti-thesis. After the victory of the liberation struggle it will be the synthesis. You understand?” He stares at me. I shake my head. “It’s Marx,” says Shao­lin. “The movement of history. The developments of freedom.” He leans forward, shutting one eye. “But are you a Majuta, like your friend from U.S.?”

  “Am I Jewish? Um, ja. Ja, I am.”

  “Then you should know Marx. Marx, he was a rabbi’s son. Synthesis is the justice of history. We are the antithesis, they are the thesis.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You don’t know,” says Shaolin, leaning back and waving his arm. “You have to read.” I try to smile like I’ll get right on that. Shaolin spits out the gum and snaps his fingers. “Let me see the weapon,” he says. I say, “Weapon?” He creaks around in his seat, sideways, putting his leg over the plastic armrest, and shakes his finger at me. “Ai, wena,” he says—hey, you—“do not play the games with me. If I’m giving the order to show the weapon, you pull out that goddem weapon and you show the weapon for us now.”

  I want to say I don’t know anything about a weapon but what’s the point? I know what he means. I was all big-stuff about having it before, but now I wish I’d never seen it in all my life. Wish I’d never met Annie Goldberg. I say the word okay and I reach up under my shirt. Comrade Guillotine is there straightaway with that handgun in his hand all casual, tapping on his brown leg under the shorts. I put my hands up so fast it’s like I’m a jerked string puppet. The others chuckle.

  “Show the weapon,” Shaolin tells me, “but be very careful.”

  “No problem,” I say. “No problem no problem no problem.”

  15

  The thing is trembling in my hands, held out like a beggar’s hat.

  “What is that?” he says.

  “A video,” I say.

  “A vidyo.”

  “Ja, a videotape. It’s what she brought.”

  “What is in it?”

  “In it? It’s a tape, that’s all.”

  Shaolin’s palm is still up, his lips get thin and then pop forward like he’s going to kiss something and then get thin again. “No,” he says. “It is explosive inside, she brings for us. Clever. Some new kind of Semtex?” I shake my head and I almost smile at how silly that is but then I get serious again really fast when I see Shaolin’s face. “You play games with me you can get hurt. I have trainings in intelligence, boy. Look at me. If you want, we can interrogate you also, understand?” When he says that word interrogate the others sort of groan and move in closer.

  I talk fast. “No, I just meant it won’t blow up. I know it’s video cos I—”

  “Shut,” says Shaolin. He speaks words I can’t understand and Electrocute steps in and takes the cassette from me and gives it to him. He turns it around, flips up the plastic strip, and stares at the magnetic tape under it. Holds it to his ear and gives a shake. “This one,” he says, “can be a transmitter. It can give the enemy a location, it can record what we are say.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s just—”

  “Yes it can,” he says. “Shut.”

  I shut.

  “CIA,” says Shaolin. “Americans,” he says. “They think we are the stupid who can take this tape and then they can track us. Or else. Maybe it is a new kind of explosive. Very small. And when we put it in the machine and push play—boom! Like what the police did to Anton Nemanashi, our ANC lawyer, they send him a tape in a Walkman and he plays it and the earphones blows off his own head. So this can be . . .” He holds the tape and shakes it towards the others. “Can be veruh-veruh dangerous. You understand, gents? You must always suspect.”

  “Honestly,” I say. “It’s not ganna blow up. I helped put it together. It’s just tape inside.”

  Shaolin stands up quick and lifts the tape like a hammer and I flinch back so hard I lose my balance. That cracks them up. Shaolin says
, “Then why are you so frighten, if it’s not a bomb? I am trained in the interrogation. If we have a problem with a comrade, a problem of internal security, we can bring him here for a nice braaivleis.” He’s using the full Afrikaans word for barbecue this time, stretching it out—not just braai but braaivleis, not just fire-cooking but fire-cooking-meat. Vleis being meat, like our English word flesh. The way they are laughing and staring at me, it makes my skin itch. “You like braai-vleis?” Shaolin is saying. I nod like crazy. “Gents,” Shaolin says, “he likes braaivleis.” They laugh even more. This is a joke I’m definitely not getting. I’m sweating like a sumo in a sauna. Shaolin asks me, “You have the braaivleis in Greenside?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Every Sunday.”

  They’re killing themselves laughing now. Then Shaolin says two words and it stops and Guillotine goes to the tarp. Shaolin holds on to my arm friendly-like, his hand cool and rough. The tarp goes back, it’s all charred black underneath like after a bush fire and then I make out these twisted-up wires on top. I keep looking and see a skull and some other bones, a jaw with teeth, ribs. It’s not wire, it’s people. When I see the melted rubber I’m sure. Necklacing. People burnt up alive here. “You don’t want to tell lies to us, Mah-ten,” says Shaolin.

  My voice says, “Absolutely not.”

  “This vidyo, it’s a trap, a trick. It is CIA. Not so?”

  I have never thought so fast in all my life. “All I know,” I say, “is that Annie the American? She brought it all the way here to Jules. It’s something special. And I took it from her bag. That is all I know, Comrade Shaolin. I swear to God that is all.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, ja, yes, absolutely,” I say, nodding as fast as I’ve ever. “Because do you remember? Do you remember, hey, how she didn’t want me, at the car, didn’t want me to give it to you? Remember that, hey? She was tryna stop me, but I got in the car cos, you know, I thought, you, you should have it and not her, the American! To help you. I took it from her bag to help you guys out. Not her. Remember? Cos I’m for you guys aren’t I? I mean I rather bring it to you myself. Hey? Izzen it?”

  Shaolin steps back, cocking his head and wagging the tape in the air between us. Then he grins like a floodlight. “That is good one,” he says. “Good one!”

  16

  Shaolin gives Jaws the tape and Jaws drives the BMW away and the rest of us go on foot along a different path, taking a “double up”—their slang for shortcut—across the veld where some fires are still making smoke from the violence before. But we don’t see anyone, we move along carefully until we reach the mud stream and the shantytown again. Comrade Shaolin walks in front through the alleys between the huts and people pop out everywhere to shake his hand, touch his shoulder. We walk deep into the shanties and enter a hut. A pair of boys in shorts, one armed with an AK-47 almost as tall as he is, stand up and salute, lifting their fists. Shaolin does the same and they slide a corrugated iron wall to the side and behind is a big open hall full of people. Inside it smells of bodies and earth and paraffin, some light comes from lanterns but daylight’s also poking through holes in the roof of corrugated iron held up by beams of stacked construction blocks. Up front there’s a stage made of old milk crates covered by flattened cardboard boxes. People turn to look at Shaolin and they lift their fists and he salutes back. He talks to some of them, murmuring in ears, and they nod and run off. At the side there’s a big easy chair with a rip showing stuffing. Shaolin sits and points and I take a plastic chair opposite.

  There are even more people in here than I first thought and more keep arriving, a young crowd of mostly teenagers, standing room only. I see red UDF and tons of yellow ANC T-shirts that are supposed to be banned. Your bullets cannot stop us, one shirt says. Liberation before education, says another. “You impress, this place?” Shaolin says to me.

  “Yes,” I say. “I am.”

  He nods. “We built this here in Klipkamp because is our fortress. They can’t even watch from helicopter.” Klipkamp is Afrikaans for Stone Camp and I reckon they call it that cos of all the stones on the tin roofs, here in the shantytown. “They cannot drive their armour vehicles in,” Shaolin is saying, “so they will not enter.” A woman wearing a black beret brings Shaolin a plate of fried something, oozing fatty smells. I feel my stomach moving and realise how hungry I am. Shaolin says, “You like some? Is good.”

  “What is it?”

  “Is meat.”

  “What kind?”

  “Pork meat.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Yes, Majuta never eats pig. Is the stomach part, this. Is good.” He chews, licks his fingers. The grease shines in a thin line of sun across his lips. “Do you know,” he says, “what my name is?”

  “Shaolin? Sounds like kung fu.”

  He nods. “I will tell you. But the story is very long. You have to listen to all of it to understand. See, to start, my father, his job was a rubbish boy, and my mother she was a cleaning girl. We lived just here, I can show you, is still there. On Nineteenth Street, in yard fourteen. We don’t have names for streets in Jules, they don’t give us names, we are not worth names. My mother worked for a golf club in Edenvale. My father worked for municipality. They give to him a long piece of steel, like this, sharp one side, with a wood on the other to hold, and he would take a sack, and all day walk and stick the rubbish on the spike and put in the sack. Keeping the white parks clean for the white chil­drens. Salary, seven rands a week. There were nine of us with two rooms, like you can see, all sleep on the floor. My one brother died of TB. You know, coughing, tuber-closis? Yuh. My father got one extra job for a company which is stripping offices. He must pull out the edge carpets, you know what is underneath? Nails like little teeth. You are supposed to have things on your knees for this work, protections, but they gave nothing. One day my father put his knee on the nails. They are full of glue, poison. His knee went this big. He could not walk. He lost his job with the municipality. I was the clever one of all us, I learnt fastest, I remembered everything without trying. My mother was religious and even before school she taught me literacy because she wanted me to read the Bible, wanted me to be a pastor, a bishop one day. But my father said I should learn to read only so that I can understand the whites, the enemy. My mother wanted me to love my enemy like Jesus but my father didn’t believe in Jesus. He said Jesus was another white man. He used to lie there with his bad leg up and he would drink. We didn’t have money for pain medicines but there was the cheap skokiaan, you know, the homemade stuff what you get, and he would mix that in with our kind of beer and he would drink all day. He was in a vast lots of pain. I think that the poison for those nails went into his bones. We only have that shit clinic and can do nothing, the drug is too expensive. He was a very quiet man but when he was drunk in that time he used to take that rubbish spike and pick up and say for me, ‘You see, my son? My grandfather, your great-grandfather, he was a free man who had a real spear in his hand and he used that real spear to fight the white man with all his strength. But the white man, he has won and took away our spears and gives to us this toy instead. So now instead of stabbing the enemy we go around stabbing his rubbish with a little toy, like children. That is what we are in our own country, my boy. We fight rubbish for the whites. We are rubbish boys, not warriors. We are rubbish ourselves, to them.’

  “With my father not working, I had to leave school very early. And I loved school. The books, the learning. I went into town and looked for work. There was a bioscope for our people, in Commissioner Street by the taxi stop to Soweto. The manager gave me a job to do the cleaning up between the films. Four double features every day, six hundred seats. In the white bioscopes, the Ster-Kinekor bioscopes, they show the good films from America, but for us it was the cheap films that come from China with the dubbing. Koong foo films. What you said before, kung fu fighting is Shaolin, from Shaolin temple, yuh. All this films, you see, the story is the same. There is a poor boy with nothing to start, who
knows nothing. Then bad people with all the power, they kill his family or beats him up, or steal from him and he can do nothing. He is weak at the beginning, he is repressed under. But then he runs away and he finds a teacher of kung fu, you see, that power of Shaolin. And after he has it, he goes back and he uses it to smash up those bad ones. He breaks their bloody bones. Then he can get married and have a happy ending. I never was tired of watching those movies. You see, Martin, in those times I have had nothing in my head. No political matters, no understanding of anything. But when I started going into town then, that was how I started to see it for myself. How the whites live. How clean his big double-decker bus is, no crowds. The women with their make-up and perfumes and nice dresses. The shops full of all the goods and plenty of rands to buy what they want. The fat man in the restaurant drinking the wine from the crystals with soft, clean tableclothes. I am living here, down, down in the rubbish pit, why, because I am black, only because I am black. But I didn’t choose my skin. Why must I be punish for my skin which is not anything I did to anyone? Black on my skin, black I can never wash off or get rid of. Yes, I tell you, those days I wanted to scrub it off and get on one of those nice buses, empty, and find a nice seat alone instead of squashed in and ride with it to the suburb with the big house with the swimming pool also. I also wanted to go to a good school with the best teachers. I thought to take sandpapers and rub my skin and make it bleed and will grow back white skin. The black skin the colour to me was the colour of dirt. My father was a rubbish boy. Like I belong to dirt and I can never get rid. I wanted to be white and clean and rich and everything easy and nice. I am telling you honest, you see? I was mentally sick. I used to have dreams—I never forget them—of taking off my skin like a shirt and burning it. Because that is what I am told I am every single day in town. When I was little all I knew was this place and I never felt it, but when I started in town and must take that goddem bus where you must fight for space, packed in, where there are tsotsis at the stop that can kill you for twenty cents like nothing, every day, then I know. Then I see myself. I am clever and I understand. I see where I am caught, where I can never come out. Like a trap. I am cleaning up the rubbish in the bioscope and I am my father again. They take away the real spear and they give to you a toy instead. And why must it be, heh? What have I done? Is it my fault? Why is it that I was born here in Julius Caesar township and you have been born white in Greenside in the same city, twenty minutes that way on the M1. Uh? What did I do? How am I wrong in myself? Can you answer me . . .”