Following the blue line

Bandile Dlabantu*

This story is dedicated to a childhood friend.

It was the 2004 Full Contact Karate championships in Port Elizabeth. My best friend, Sizwe, the hero of the provincial team, was stepping onto the mat for his final bout. After months of preparation and a lifetime of dreaming he was poised to take his place in the South African team that was to tour Japan. Win or lose, he was in, but as a matter of principle he had to wipe the smirk from Piet Marais’s face. Twice had Piet denied him victory and today would be his day of reckoning. I stood as his corner man, ready to help with tactical advice and friendly support. It had been years since I’d stopped karate, but we still trained together, especially when Sizwe prepared for tournaments.

The gong sounded for the second round and the fight ended: Piet, refusing to come out of his corner, could not fight anymore. The judges were just about to declare Sizwe the winner when his legs buckled, sending him head first onto the tatami. Everyone was stunned into silence as the paramedics moved in and took him to the casualty ward of Dora Nginza Hospital.

*

“Riaan, Riaan, waar is jy?” bellowed the now desperate voice. It had been calling since five in the morning. Another one, more screeching, repeated the words and disturbed my almost peaceful sleep. Most of the slumber hours I had spent tossing and turning trying to calm the dry, burning pain in my throat. “Riaan, Riaan!” The voices called frantically for the lost soldier in this tame bush. Just yesterday they had chased down their fleeing quarry along the dusty roads into the shantytown called Veeplaas. My juvenile mind had no understanding of the reason, implication and casting of the farcical tragedy that was to play itself out that day. The pursued herd dispersed down the rude alleys among the badly-built but proud houses with the mud-brown-clad soldiers in hot pursuit, weapons and dogs in hand. They fired teargas canisters and released fleeting rounds of rubber at the backs of the runners.

I turned onto my stomach, tried to draw a heavy breath, but the feeling of fire in my throat would not let me. They had shot a teargas canister into the house on the very day I had an asthma attack. I coughed until blood came out of my mouth and the pain was so severe I passed out. The soldiers, having no respect for my slumber or my sore throat, continued to call, getting closer with each call. It was a Sunday, nogal, and no one had to go to school. My brother had to leave when the riots started, into the safety of the Ciskei, leaving me with no one to ride tandem with on his bike, a dusty skeleton hanging on the toilet roof. No one would touch it. He had moved on silently in the night, away from the burning schools and mass riots caused by his peers, with each step further away from me. This initial drift primed a chain of events that over the years made us strangers. Strangers forced by bonds of blood to get on, but in truth having nothing in common.

The companions called on in a foreign tongue that I could not yet decipher.

It had been nearly fifteen years since that fateful day and I had long erased it. We had embraced the rainbow of goodwill and no one need bring up the past unless it brought with it political advantage, therefore forcing the event into the mists of time. A new world and a liberal awakening had now been embraced. “Equality for all”, “nation building” and the partial “righting of old wrongs” were the current buzzwords heard as far as Johannesburg. Yet the traumatised children caught in the time warp of burning townships find no place in this paradise. They are slowly squashed out of existence; their stories scatter the land with no one to tell them. There they remain, erased on the surface, but tied with rusty chains in the deep rat-infested dungeons of their chests, until the day desperation triggers malicious self-destruction.

*

We followed Sizwe’s ambulance from the Centenary Hall, past Ndokwenza, the run-down slum that once served as hostels housing migrant labourers. Many of the Bhaca, Hlangwini, Mfengu and Mpondo men had long gone back home. Behind them they left a desolate field of broken hearts and fatherless broods to carve out their own identity in the city. Their songs spoke of their lands and the heartbreak of expectant lovers back home, and hardships of leaving, as slaves in their native lands. And we would never again feel the earth rumble under their stomping feet recalling lost days of great kings and of life as warriors unchallenged in all this land. Now it was a horrid grotto brimming with prostitutes, pimps, drug-pushers and addicts.

On we drove past the crowded Njoli, up its main street to the gates of Dora Nginza Hospital. In we drove until we came to the emergency ward.

The attendant at the front desk was an obese woman of forty with a leg severely deformed by elephantiasis. We called, trying to get her attention, but she pretended not to hear as she kept speaking on the phone whilst slurping the contents of a 1-litre coke bottle with a straw.

“Sister, er, excuse me, Sister, we are looking for a friend, Sizwe Mvelase; he came in about an hour ago, he was in a Karate tournament,” we called. She glanced at us, pouted her lips and continued to speak and slurp. Finally, when she had finished her call, she sauntered over to help us. I noticed that under the thick layer of base, her left cheek had a blue blotch and one corner of her mouth was cracked, showing signs of a recent beating. She looked at us with bloodstained eyes and curtly informed us that she had just started her shift and therefore could not know what had happened in the last shift. She then pointed with her long purple nail down the passageway and instructed us to follow the blue line to Admissions.

The corridor was littered with beds and stretchers covered with soiled or bloody linen sheltering the broken victims of the weekend’s festivities. The smell of sterilising alcohol, putrid human flesh and emanation invaded my nostrils. Each step I took caused the contents of my stomach to surge up into my throat.

Sizwe, we were informed, had been moved to Mercantile Hospital; they had suspected brain haemorrhaging and admitted him for advanced tests.

The relief washed over me – he was at a better hospital – and at last I was calm enough to remember that I needed to use the toilet. I rushed down the winding passage, on and on, and turning left, by luck, I found the toilet and with it release.

Trying to retrace my steps, I discovered that I was completely lost. All the passages looked the same. I looked on the floor and tried to follow the blue line back to where my friends were. I walked on until guided as if by an invisible cord to a painted door with a green number 201. I opened it and saw the apparition lying shackled to a bed covered in a loose hospital gown boldly marked with the word Prisoner. He had long ago ceased to look like a human being; instead, his gaunt outline appeared like a spider monkey afflicted with an advanced state of mange.

I was about to creep out slowly when a parched voice came from the bed and softly called, “Amanzi, please I am thirsty.” Fear tore into me, yet I could not refuse him. I haltingly moved to the sink, filled a paper cup with water and brought it to him. He got up to drink, but could not move his chained arms; I had to put the cup to his lips, making sure that no part of him touched my flesh. I did not look at his diseased body, but I had already seen too much, and my skin crawled from the fear of infection. He looked right at me and hissed, “Brian, Brian, it is you; who would have known that I would see you again? It’s me, Tito.” I jumped away sent a jet of water flying to the adjacent wall. Composing myself, I came closer and stared at the horror that was this man.

He lay there with a morphine drip snaking into his arm. I tried to remember Tito, the boisterous boy; he was two years older than I was. He used to entertain us by spinning wild yarns and getting angry when people would not believe him. I remembered fighting him because I called him a liar. He was so strong then and the fight went on for an eternity. Pride alone had kept me from giving up and crying. That was the last day we played together. After the police raids he was sent away. His old parents still stayed in the same house. When he came back in the early nineties he had become delinquent, stealing money from his parents and neighbours. He had even been publicly whipped by a kangaroo court after having broken into a spaza shop. The police picked him up two months later for other crimes and sent him to some reformatory. That was the last we heard of him; no one spoke about him afterwards; we went on as if he had died.

Now here he was, showing a set of rotting broken teeth set on white-flecked gums. He was scrawny, with missing hair and fingernails, the result of an untreated case of scabies. His face was covered with pussy sores and blisters that housed numerous fungal colonies. He smelled peculiarly like sour milk that had been forgotten in the sun. Only his eyes betrayed him as Tito, my childhood friend. I tried to look at him, but averted my eyes to the cracks on the wall instead.

I held the last of the water to his lips, wishing I was somewhere else. When he had finished he asked me if the police officer at the door was still there. “If I could still walk I would be on my way back home, that bouwagter is busy trying to chat up the nurses, the bloody spy. He thinks I am already dead; well, I will show him. As soon as I am well, I’m escaping and going back home.”

I looked at him with a lump growing in my throat. “Ndoda, how did you get here? I have not seen you in ten years. Where have you been?”

He paused. “My bra, it’s a long story and when it started you were still a laaitie – I think you were about nine. Remember that day the soldiers came looking for Riaan?” I remembered that uncomfortable week, with the police and soldiers raiding houses looking for every male who was in his teens or older.

Our old playgrounds had all disappeared; the river where we used to fish for scallies had long died, wiped out by the rubbish, raw sewage and chemical waste pumped into it daily. The beautiful river we used to swim in had turned into a disease-infested swamp fit only to breed mosquitoes. I remembered how we used to throw stones at police and army vehicles from under the bridge, doing our part for the struggle. Some of the old neighbours had long gone, new ones came in their place, changing the face of the kassie. The smell of the teargas, the gunshots and the constant raids were cast into the forgotten plains, but the shame of the burning eighties still lay untreated, ruling our dreams and actions each day.

For each day of that fateful week, “they” had chased the youths down the dusty township streets amid the burning government buses and broken shop windows. “They” wore gasmasks and shot teargas canisters and rubber bullets; everyone else choked. However, “they” were too busy sjambokking and kicking those that could not run fast enough, dragging their bloody, lacerated bodies into their large brown military trucks, to notice. I watched the white soldiers running into the squatter camp each day, but on Friday evening five ran down the dusty street and only four worried faces returned. The other soldiers did not seem to care, drunk with the fear and mayhem they caused with their tanks, Mellow-yellows and Hippos. The power they yielded seemed to change them from mere mortals to gods, immune to danger or humanity, as horrified masses scurried in front of them. Riaan was lying unconscious under a false floor, behind the door of a house built out of corrugated iron and plastic sheets.

He paused and drank from the cup and began his tale.

“Late that Saturday night I could not sleep, so I went outside to cool myself. That was when I spied a group of youths speaking in hushed tones, walking with single-minded determination. ‘It’s time those dogs paid,’ said one in his mother tongue and I could not hear the replies. No one knows that I sneaked out and followed into the night, keeping an eye out for the routine police patrols that haunted the streets at night. I stalked down the familiar streets that now cast ghostly shadows down into the shantytown. I saw them in a circle like vultures around the prostate form of Riaan. The soldier looked so powerless now, stripped of his weapons, gas and uniforms. He was covered by red welts rained on him with the very sjambok he had wielded the previous day, looking like a rooster’s comb that covered every part of his terrified, kneeling body. This was the day that the mighty white man was going to pay, some shouted.

“They punched and battered him with the sjambok, with planks. They pelted him with rocks and other malevolent tools, cursing and spitting on the kneeling form. The frenzy rose to an alien pitch. Even I was feeling the blood lust, but fear held me back. Then some wretched soul brought a black council bucket into the circle.”

Squatter people had no flushing toilets like we who lived in Zwide. Squatter camps were no Eden, and there was no plumbing, so all relief was done in a bucket. The stench could be felt at its worst on Tuesday mornings when the council night soil removal vans came around, manned by a crew of whistling Bhaca men who left their families a long time ago in order to suffer the degradation of that work. At least it brought food to the table to feed their expectant but oblivious families back in the Transkei.

It had been weeks since these men came to pick up their loads. They worked for the city and therefore were seen as minions of the oppressors. No one was to go to work or buy from white-owned stores; government vehicles that found their way to the township were torched. It was a time of smoke and ashes reminiscent of scenes from a Mad Max movie; the old order was being sung its last rites by mobs of angry youths who defied the very words of their enslaved parents and claimed with frigid hearts and clenched fists their right to be free. Youthful, unholy, unmonitored fervour and aggravated rage were now to enclose the prostate figure that was once the proud Riaan.

Tito then started to sob.

“The man prayed for compassion in his idiom and then, using a broken kitchen Xhosa, he called once again. Instead of mercy he found heightening rage as they heard him rape their native tongue. My chest was starting to burn again. I knelt down after another violent cough. They gave him the bucket and ordered him to drink. When he refused, a young man put a white-hot branding iron on his back. He refused again and they poured the offensive contents of the container all over him. I heard them sing a freedom song with lyrics denouncing him as a dog, a devil that did not deserve any mercy for the sins of his kind. As I was kneeling I wondered whether it was him who flattened the wall to our garden on Wednesday. Maybe he was the man who kicked down the door on Thursday, dragging my mother out by her hair accusing her of hiding terrorists. Maybe it was he who on Friday shot the teargas canister into my house and seared my lungs. The man lying there did not look like any of those men – he was smaller – and instead of bed-wetting fear I felt sorrow for him.

“One of the youths called for a necklace and from behind the crowd it came. The man did not cry or move this time. He sat there like a drugged sheep mumbling something incomprehensible. It was as though he accepted death as the only cure for this humiliation by a race so inferior to him. He looked just like the sheep that my grandfather had slaughtered on Christmas day, I remembered crying when its throat was slit, but the apparition in front of me did not rouse any strong emotion, only morbid allure. They torched the tyre necklace and he rose up from his flaming burden and tried to remove it. I saw someone kick him in the chest and as he stumbled, a panga banged at the back of his head. I think I heard him scream, but maybe that was just I.

“He fell down twitching as the flames engulfed him and the popping sound of a head splitting rose from the burning mass. “Yizani namatayara!” barked the order and other youths came with tyres and covered the remains, from head to foot, feeding the hellish inferno. I quickly ran back to the house and jumped into bed with no one even stirring.

“I now know that is the day when things went bad in my life; an eleven-year-old boy should never have seen that. It has been playing and playing in my head for years, not stopping; even now I can hear him speak. That entire week my aunt looked at me as if expecting me to fall down and give a tearful confession of all I had seen. I kept quiet for seventeen years, working my way from each nightmare to the next.

“They called for Riaan for two more days. On the third I woke up early and went with you and Sizwe to the place I last saw him. All that was left was a tangled mass of tyre wire and ash with streaks of what seemed like fat or oil. You laughed at me and did not believe; you both kept on taunting, calling me a liar. I got so angry I wanted to kill you. That is the day of our fight. After that day I could never get anything right. That damned place made animals of all of us.”

Tito then put his head down on his pillow and drifted into sleep, leaving me to digest and find meaning in the story he told. Maybe Riaan’s friends found the remains and took them home; I pray they laid him to rest in a peaceful place. Now I know that Veeplaas translates into “animal farm” and it made animals of those who lived in it and those who patrolled it. The time of the burning townships is gone, but the memories of such nights still haunt the silent watchers.

I left Tito snoring on his hospital bed.

A week later Sizwe returned home; a kick from Piet had given him a severe concussion, and he would not be fighting in Japan. The team manager assured him that he could go as one of the members of the technical crew.

The police arrived at Tito’s house at about eight o’clock and told his mother he had died of an Aids-related illness, probably contracted during his stints in prison.

We laid his body to rest in the Korsten cemetery and went on our way, trying once more to forget about him and his sad tales. We were the watchers in that time, saw the fire, we smelled the tear gas and tyre necklaces. We saw how hatred turned people into mobs and how mobs turned into fire-wielding demons.

We had to move on. The eighties are over; we have survived and tasted the freedom that men like Riaan died for. Now it is our choice to forget and walk the path again, or remember, and change our future.

I made the choice to sit and honour Tito and Riaan, whose stories were sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and shame. But there are many more, still waiting to be told, still waiting to be free.

Bandile Dlabantu Born in Port Elizabeth he has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Life Sciences from Rhodes University and is currently working as a junior business analyst for an IT company in Johannesburg. He is also a part time youth facilitator at a local children’s centre, with an interest in Sufi and Bhakti poetry, as well anything by African writers. He is in the process of releasing the performance poetry inside himself.

Free your story Send your short stories, no more than 8 pages in length, to sharon@litnet.co.za.

LitNet: 25 April 2006

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