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Praise for Finding Mr Madini Directed by Jonathan Morgan and the Great African Spider Writers First Published in 1999 by Ink, an imprint of David Philip Publishers “An important and wonderful experiment where narratives contest one another. It provides a forum for marginalised street narratives to surface in print.” – Antjie Krog, author of Country of my Skull “A strange and oddly touching journey into the underbelly of a great African city.” – Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart “Kusinwa kudedelwana – dancers must make way for one another – and so must ideas, figures of speech and poetic expressions! Jonathan has gone and done it. The result is a book that will never fail to find a home in our heart. Yebo! It’s time, amalunda, to dance centre-stage.” – Gcina Mhlope, author of Have You Seen Zandile? “A raw and powerful book about Johannesburg, a work unlike anything ever written...” – Andrew Donaldson, Sunday Times “When he went searching for someone on whom to base a fictional homeless character, psychologist and aspiring novelist Jonathan Morgan got a lot more than he bargained for. The result is Finding Mr Madini… arguably the most important South African novel of the year.” – Craig Canavan “Finding Mr Madini is extraordinary. It is the flesh and the voice of a huge slice of humanity that has fallen through the cracks of a world we take for granted.” – John Matshikiza, Mail & Guardian i
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First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2014 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š Jonathan Morgan and Sipho Madini, 2014 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-4314-0863-4 Also available as an e-book: 978-1-4314-0864-1 d-PDF 978-1-4314-0865-8 ePUB 978-1-4314-0866-5 mobi Cover design by publicide Set in Sabon 11/15pt Job no. 002199 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za vi
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To my younger sister, Judy Morgan, who reviewed this manuscript in its early draft form and without whose encouragement White Paper White Ink may never have seen the light of day. To my parents, Issy and Ora, who deserve as much nachas as anyone can possibly get. Also to Kyoko, Masego, Taiji, Barak and Ruth. – Jonathan Morgan
This book is primarily dedicated to my grandmother, Elizabeth Mlambo, who raised me as her own son. Then I would like to say thank you to the National Arts Council who, in 2003, gave me R5000 to write a novel based on my experiences in prison. For ten years they may have been wondering what became of that money. – Sipho Madini
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Acknowledgements
The initial encouragement to write this book came from Jos Thorne. Thanks, Jos. The first ideas were then jotted down on the back of an SAA paper bag while sitting between my children Masego and Taiji on a plane to Johannesburg. Then of course there is my co-author Sipho Madini. Acknowledgements also go to Carol Broomhall, Maggie Davey and Bridget Impey of Jacana whose enthusiastic response to White Paper White Ink put wind in my sail and joy in my heart. Thank you, Maggie and Carol, for being so patient with me and with your careful readings of the manuscript and key editorial suggestions. And, of course, a huge thank you to Sean Fraser, my excellent editor. Also special thanks to Paul Zwi and Sandy Hoffman whose encouragement and critical feedback were highly valued, as well as to Peter Merrington, Clive Margolis, Silke Heiss, Paul Mason, Sizwe Abrams, Glyn Davies and Chris Giffard for their support and comments. Thank you also to Pieter and Dog (not their real names), my connections to the Number up the West Coast. Your insider knowledge of the Number and your tattoos were key to my research. Thanks also to David Miles and Sue Kaplan for all the work we did together on the illustrations. Thank you also to Jonny Steinberg, Heather Parker-Lewis, Araminta de Clermont, Michael Subotzky, Alf Wannenberg, Pippa Skotnes, Neil Bennun, Jackie Loos, Sol Plaatje, Scott Balson, Cloete Breytenbach, Rider Haggard, JB Peires, Linda Fortune, Allan Little, Don Pinnock, Laurie Levine, Charles van Onselen and DC Martin whose work I drew on and who are all formally acknowledged in the lists of references at the back of this book. – Jonathan Morgan ix
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Finding Mr Madini (page 17) – First time Jonathan meets Sipho, eight months before Finding Mr Madini is published A Shangaan woman with unshaved armpits holding a barrel full of holes and red coals on her head forces me off the pavement. Black smoke clouds her head but it is me who coughs and can’t stop, even in the lift where I join a young man in a red-brown leather jacket. He presses the button, the doors begin to close, but they fail and he presses again, then looks at his feet. I stare at the flickering numbers above the door. “I’m Jonathan,” I eventually say. He looks up and smiles, “Sipho.” “Are you Sipho Madini?” I ask. “Yes,” he answers and we step out. “You write that column in Homeless Talk called ‘Survival on the Street’, don’t you?” He is younger than I expected, maybe eighteen? But there is something much older about him too. We walk down the passage and we try to open the heavy door to get into the Homeless Talk office. It doesn’t budge. “Is Homeless Talk closing down?” I ask. “I read something like that in the paper.” He shrugs. A few minutes later an older man steps out the lift. His shoes are heavily polished but have no tongues. His laces are pulled tight against his bare skin. For ten minutes we sit on the floor not saying much. Three is almost a group. “Let’s see how many come next week and bring some writing with you, anything,” I say to Eddie and Sipho as I get up. As I pass bunches of bananas on the pavement, I think maybe I should buy a whole lot of them before the workshop next week, or even a few loaves of bread and some peanut butter. Naaa, they’ll think I’m getting all soup kitcheny. I’m relieved that my car is where I parked it and that the baby seat is still there. As I dig into my pockets to get my keys I notice Sipho standing behind me. I smile and open the front door, prompting 1
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the leopard at the back to bob its neck. I bought the carving from a Zimbabwean where the freeway ends. The leopard is wood and the detachable head is weighted with a piece of steel. “This is my chorrie,” I say, nodding at an old but wellpreserved metallic-blue Mazda. “She’s a beauty,” says Sipho, walking away backwards, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his red-brown leather jacket. I had a dream of love spreading in the world Beating proudly in the chest of men Held aloft like a triumphant banner Wars crushed in its wake and the wells of tears ran dry I dreamed of hands reaching out Lifting hands, comforting hands Brotherly hugs and sisterly kisses Given without a second thought Beggars, tears, anguish Prisons, empty buildings Rotting food in dirty dustbins A thing of the past Of flowers springing all about us Singing birds Smiling faces Loving hearts You might say it was a communist kind of dream Others might say it was a silly kind of dream And I might just say... ... it was my kind of dream – ‘Communist kind of dream’, Sipho Madini, Homeless Talk, September 1999 2
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✪ Can you believe it? They treat my column, ‘Tips to Survive on the Street’, as a poem! Going rate R50 a pop. One would expect at least R100 for a column, right? Not to downgrade my own poems or poetry or anything, but this is a C-O-LU-M-N spells column, dammit! It’s something readers come back to month after month – it’s the reason many of them buy this sad paper! Anyway, I should at least be glad there’s a demand. In one fell swoop I just earned myself six times R50 equals R300. A small fortune. After dropping off the next six instalments of ‘Tips to Survive on the Street’ at the editor’s office and pocketing the cash, I spend a few hours in the No Name Tavern on Rissik Street waiting till 6.30 pm for the weekly Homeless Talk journalists’ meeting. I do not feel good and I don’t really think I should have come in the first place. Jonathan’s the new white guy, clothes not torn, but crumpled, and poor colour coordination. Whoever heard of red-almost-pink trousers with a drawstring and a yellow T-shirt? And last week when asked if he could run the Creative Writing workshop, he said he couldn’t say for sure, that he’d have to ask his wife! A man should always wear the pants, dammit. What does this man want from us anyway? When I walk into the room in the Longsbank building, this dilapidated half-mast skyscraper in Jo’burg’s city centre and home of the Homeless Talk newspaper, Jonathan has begun the lessons. He turns from the flipchart. His face lights up, “Hi, Sipho.” I smile back. The rest of the group nods a welcome. I go and sit in the furthest corner where I can see them all but they can’t see me. Got an awful hangover – I don’t want him to notice that I am not my usual self. Why let down the black race and the homeless community in one go? This is our writers’ workshop held every Monday evening at these offices. Here us Homeless Talk journalists share ideas about the stories we are working on, get feedback and 3
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suggestions, including what stories we might chase for the upcoming edition. This Jonathan guy told us last week that homelessness is a state of mind – that you can stay in a double-storey house and still feel homeless. Easy for him to say. After the workshop I try to slip out but he asks me to wait for him. Outside the street is still bright and vibrant under the street lights. Lots of people on the pavement. Vendors still selling their goods. “Howzit going, Sipho?” he asks once he comes out the building. “Just fine, Jonathan, just fine.” I smile bitterly, thinking about the guys who tried to rob me last night, thinking about people in general – people who make your life a misery, when you are already as down and out as can be. He climbs into his car and rolls down the window. “You sure?” he asks again. It’s funny that howzit thing, that South African greeting. Do people really want to know? He does it seems, and he also seems to want to convince me to the contrary about my fine-ness. “Like I said, I’m F-I-N-E,” I say with a big F to get him out my face. He straightens in his seat. “Okay, see you then,” he shrugs as he rolls the Mazda into the mostly mini-bus-taxi-evening-traffic of Bree Street. It is nearly 8 o’clock. If I hurry I may be in time for Universal, the church that is giving out food today. After that I can go to the tavern there in Hillbrow with the big TV. My favourite team Orlando Pirates is playing Kaiser Chiefs, and I might just pick myself up a scoop (a babe, not a story). ✪ To the front, the University of the Witwatersrand, tall and erect, the institute of learning. To the left, Saffas, the funeral parlour. And every day as I wake and creep out of my gutter, eyes blinking, I see long, black polished hearses and a kaleidoscope of flashily dressed kids getting out of VW Beetles and GTIs. 4
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My drain is just a stone’s throw from the glass doors through which thousands of students come and go every day. But it is hidden by a waist-high cement wall and, anyway, I enter it long after most students have gone home and I leave in the mornings long before they arrive for their studies. To the side of the drain is a flowerbed with leafy plants maintained by the university and also nearby is a tall palm tree and a street light as well as a ‘No Parking’ sign. You guessed it, pigeons love this place. University of the Witwatersrand. Translated, Wit equals White, Water equals H20 (read, running water) and Rand equals SA money. All of which are in short supply in my life. I sweep a glance around although I know that I won’t be bothered. Maybe because it’s in such a public place, but we street kids and homeless can drop out of the landscape, just like that. And, anyway, we are invisible to most of the students. To the staff of the funeral parlour, we are not worth burying. Even the university security guards have little idea we are here. It’s outside their beat. I lower myself into the drain and throw down my bedding. On top of the stormwater drain is a grille we have covered with boxes, plastic, mats and whatever to keep the rain out. And inside, five of us are sleeping head to toe in the narrow interior. Foster is an overzealous tall, young boy, probably seventeen years old, whose parents are originally from Angola. He speaks Portuguese, English, Zulu and Afrikaans, all without a flaw. Then there is Bradley, a coloured from Pietermaritzburg. And Rasta – ‘Yoh mohn’. He says he’s from Zambia. And then Themba – real men don’t speak much – from the Eastern Cape. I shiver. My clothes are all wet. These summer thunderstorms so easily catch me unprepared. This has been my sleeping place for more than a year. I arrange my cardboard, good thick stuff that once packaged someone’s fridge. It is now my mattress. Using a stiff election poster that came off a lamppost, I bend down to sweep an area of about a square metre. Insects that look like cockroaches creep out of the dark, their armour glistening from the reflection of the light above, harassed by 5
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my sweeping. The grrrrr of cardboard on cement draws stares from the bugs, as if I am a landgrader coming to plough them away. I am not making sense, tired… very sleepy. I finish making the bed in the corner, with the large plastic on top. I pop my head out the drain, look across the road over the empty parking lot and into the dark that lies beyond the last street light. I wonder if I can see Jacob. Will he again sit-sleep the whole night in the little space behind me where the rain can’t reach, dreaming the whole night of his uncle’s cattle? More likely he’s at a 24-hour tavern where he will drink himself to a stupor till the morning to avoid sleeping in the rain in a flooding drain. Themba is also not here, probably at a shelter in the city spending his last cent for a dry bed. I take off my shoes and roll them in my jacket. If you don’t ventilate your soles and toes now and again you get feet problems, fungal problems, like those old-man street madalas who look like they are walking on eggs. I check that my meagre possessions, my leather jacket, my small collection of books, my dictionary and my writing pad are out of sight. Then I creep into my bed with my hands entwined behind my head. Even in the drain, looking up at an angle, I can see the ten-storey concrete tower of the university called Senate House where the bigwigs have their offices. I think about the white man. Should I return to his writing group or concentrate on my well-worn routine? Zzzzz. Go back to the writing group? Zzzzz. I shrug and descend deeper into my bed, put cheek to still-wet clothes, and feel the plastic crackle and move as I toss and turn, my mind chewing on this returning question till sleep comes. Zzzzzzz. ✪ Monday, Jozi City, collecting beer bottles to make enough to buy a half-loaf. Tuesday, trampling aluminium cans for resale. Wednesday, sitting in the taverns like a jackal, waiting for the next person to half-finish his food. Thursday and Friday, 6
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following soup kitchens and feeding-scheme queues at churches in Doornfontein and then Bertrams and then the city centre, a tri-weekly injection of cooked grub. That guy Jonathan, I feel he’s okay, but is he trying to use us? Does he purposefully dress to look homeless? This fellow is up to something, and I don’t know if I care enough to find out what it is. But his cellphone number keeps coming back to me like a litany. 083 256 2221. Why the hell have I even remembered it? Tomorrow is Friday, so I have a day to decide before the group on Saturday. Nah, even a homeless guy has to observe the Sabbath and rest. If there is nothing better to do I might drop in, discover what he is really up to, and if I don’t like it I’ll give the group an eternal miss. ✪ Chicken King, a cavernous tavern frequented by a mixture of the most down-and-outs and those clinging tenaciously to normal. It’s a run-down but lively place despite the stench of piss. Filled with scavengers who sit and watch, gulping down their saliva, while those with coins and notes nurse or gulp their drinks. It’s Friday morning. Last night, once I exited the Chicken King, I got me a fresh urgent reason to go weapon shopping. A reason and a message on top of several recent other reasons and messages. The first time was when I was less than a week in the city. Once, when I slept at the steps behind the Market Theatre close to the unused railway tracks, I opened my eyes in the middle of the night and eleven hyena boys were on me. They were after my shoes and trousers, which were still kind of respectable, me not having been on the streets long enough. The head boy, Sibusiso Khumalo – one of the most brutal and notorious street kids in the city – screamed, “Mbulale! Mbulale! Kill him. Kill him,” as he led the storm on my sleeping place. I watched as first the teeth from the top row of gums, then from 7
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the bottom rolled along the street. As I run my tongue over those gaps even now, I remember Sibusiso’s bloodshot eyes and rugged face. I cannot forget. I even remember drawing him one of those days when writer’s block gripped me like a fist holding a fire-heated five-rand coin on a freezing night. I thought maybe I should draw some cartoons for Homeless Talk, widen my repertoire from just poems and stories. I even got a few drawings accepted, although poetry is really my thing. More recently, in this same tavern, ol’ Chicken King, one night two guys – grown-up versions of the Sibusiso gang – got brave as the tavern emptied. Except for the barman, me, a girl and two other guys, no one was left. I got up to put a coin in the jukebox. One of these guys slipped in behind me and got me in a choke grip, while the other got down on his knees and emptied my pocket. They knew exactly where my money was. R50 in my back pocket. They must have been watching me. They also took my dark-blue windbreaker, which I favoured in summer when it’s too hot for the leather jacket. If they had looked a little more carefully and searched a little deeper they would have found more. Notes rolled thin as ever around the elastic of my underpant. Money I have dedicatively put away, earned from sometimes parking cars, but mostly selling street stories for the homeless newspaper. This is not like The Big Issue, which is written by famous journalists. Homeless Talk is written and sold by the homeless. In Homeless Talk, we, the bone fide homeless, pen the stories. Like I said, they pay R50 a poem, R100 a full feature, and we can also do the selling of the paper itself at traffic lights. But actually I hate that. It feels too much like begging. When a new edition comes out, especially with my poems in it, for a short while I feel okay standing at the traffic light hawking it, thinking this is better than standing here with a gun or rattling a tin can with some coins in it. Here I am standing selling a paper with my own poems on the inside. But I am having to smile and show gratitude when they say, “Keep the 8
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change.” No matter if the change is R1 or R10 or even R50 I am still left feeling like I am a charity case. By the fourth or the fifth day I can’t take it any more. Seeing the same people drive past me day after day is the worst. Having to pause and avoid eye contact, waiting for the traffic light to change. And by the end of the week it’s time to throw the remaining papers in the dustbin… till the next edition comes along. The money I had saved almost came to R600 because I do not buy food with my earnings but go to church feeding schemes to stem my hunger. What is it with that term ‘feeding schemes’? Are we animals? A man cannot live off solid food alone, we also have to drink. And it used to be only four or five beers once a week but now I don’t like to count. My money has survived the onslaught, but for how long? But I am rambling. I was telling you why I need to do some shopping. Last night, on my way home from Chicken King, I found myself ducking and diving through the streets of Hillbrow, trying to shake off another hungry pack of violent streetkids. When I took a left they were there. When I took a right they were there. A reckless sprint through the traffic and still they were there. I’ll fuck them up also, I’ll kick their asses, even if I am unarmed, I kept telling myself in beery repetitions. But in the end it never came to that. I managed to shake them and I arrived panting like a dog but in one piece at my sleeping place. But I’ve had enough of this. Always running, feeling that I am hunted, and fed up with this watching-my-back business and being taken for an easy target. I come from a city where the Honorouble Mr Knife is most respected. It is a city, too, where a man dies only four kinds of deaths. First, a natural death in old age, which is most unusual. Better to live fast and furiously, go out with a bang, and die young and beautiful. Second, death by accident. If Mr Knife has not caught you by then, then maybe a car will. Or maybe, just maybe, you believe you can swim when you are too drunk to know the difference, and who are we to argue? 9
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Number three, the unexplainable death. Whispers of magic, spells and witchcraft. And then, finally, the unwavering Mr Knife. Yes, my city is another kind of fella. Where the fastest with the knife is the most respected. Where the young kids mould their aspirations around the present heroes. Where names are spoken in low tones and awe behind their backs. In dark alleys, school yards and shebeens, somewhere the next wannabe is going to challenge for the title of Mr Knife. Or die trying. This city is a place where the weekend’s alcohol flows freely and Mr Knife speaks swiftly. It was my own father’s brother, Hendrik, who was Mr Knife. Till another guy took the title. But before Hendrik died he taught me a thing or two. How to come in close, rather than keep your distance. So close that you don’t allow the other guy to hardly move his arms at all. How to hold the knife sticking up not down. To bend your legs, not your arms, to get the knife horizontal. How to make an obvious move, then reverse it once the guy has responded. And to finish him off with a stab to an organ. And how to cut where lots of blood will gush. Or where there is the most pain that can finish the fight without you having to kill and go to jail. Respected throughout the width and breadth of Kimberley, the challenges would not stop. Hendrik was never convicted of murder. Those who got slashed and survived were too scared to press charges. Actually, there is a line of Mr Knife’s running in my very blood. My great-grandfather, Oupa, was a hard man. He’d sooner knife you through than say a bad word or quarrel. It came as no surprise that Hendrik and him would sooner or later lock horns. Especially since it was Oupa who taught Hendrik the art of the knife in the first place. To this day we in the family still don’t know what happened. We were busy on a Sunday. There was a sheep that had been stolen from over a boer’s fence. There was fire and there was beer. We would only remember my great-grandfather in his 10
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white shirt standing on the other side of the fire, and the red stain on his chest that came to cover a patch as big as his head before Hendrik’s okapi was folded and back in his pocket. Hendrik turned around and walked away out of Kimberley in the direction of Jo’burg. I always guessed he’d got lost in the big city. It wasn’t so much the law that made him an outlaw, it was the family. No way he could show his face again. Oupa nearly died that day, but he didn’t. He died many years later in his sleep, probably dreaming of the souls he had sent to the happy hunting grounds in the sky. But even before my uncle had left for Jozi he had taught me a thing or two about using a knife. Kimberley, edges ragged, the diamonds it spewed out for the rest of the world long gone. Harsh as the semi-desert expanses that encompass it. Home to all tribes but predominantly coloureds and Tswanas as common as sand. Where every boy and man has a knife. But me, I moved on to Jo’burg with my pen. It has been more than two years since I left my hometown. I came to Jo’burg on 23 February 1997 to be exact. Just six days before end of the month. Now it is already August 1999. Just shows how time flies when you are having fun. Have not run into Hendrik. Maybe he died on the wrong side of a knife. I have begun to drink the spirit of the city but now I hear Hendrik’s and Oupa’s voices before I fall into sleep where I find myself heavy on my toes, grasping for an okapi knife that is not there. Me not having a knife, that feeling of helplessness is old I tell you. At times like this I think of Mlamba, the cunt who straddled and beat and even stabbed my mother aplenty in the street with a fish knife. I was just four years old and had no knife of my own to stick into his back, not even a stone in sight on the sandy street. Enough! A battle cry on my heart. To Park Station to do some shopping. ✪ 11
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Bodies are falling out of my path like dominoes – some with far more abrupt jerks than others. I do not know if it is because, at my hurried pace, I look like a hoodlum, or that I appear to be homeless. Or do I smell? If it is the last, I swallow it like bile. “The Naledi train number 976 has arrived,” comes the female electrical voice over the intercom. “Will all the passengers for the Translux – crackle – bus to Maputo Mozambique go to their departing points. The bus has arrived and will be leaving – crackle – shortly stopping – crackle – Mpumalanga. Nelspruit. Thabazimbi.” I hear, yet do not listen. My face set in a determined mask. I shove my hands deeper into the pouches of my now-dirty trousers, arms obstructed by the sides of my red-brown leather jacket. I shrug them back into a comfortable position without losing my stride. Back bowed, the green beanie pulled firmly over my head to my eyebrows, rounded off by the thin knife scar that runs through half of my face and the rest of my cheek. People used to say that I am handsome but they don’t any more. Funny, I wonder why that is. My eyes scan the interior. From the fluorescent lights I can see gift shops, travelling agencies, butcheries, bakeries, restaurants, all sitting side by side – basking in the white glow of what is called Park Station, the poor man’s shopping Mecca of Africa right here on my doorstep. Colourful people, solitary, paired and quadrupled figures all moving at a different pace in the neon interior of Park Station. Matured and young ladies in thigh-hugging jean, gxebezanis, the mini, you name them. Dreadlocks plaited to orange hair so ‘in fashion’ as to be almost outrageous. My feet scissor out in front of me, one gorgeous young lady – deep chocolate complexion, bottleneck figure tapering into a broadside curveous brown jean – also gives me a wide berth. If I look down and out, I can’t blame anyone for shunning me. Life is hard here in Jo’burg. It does not give a penny and takes all in return. I stride through the interior, here and there I can glimpse one or two people in West African long-dress 12
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attire. A few white bodies can be glimpsed through the crowds. Some pushing or dragging a suitcase behind them. Are they wanting to emigrate? Or are they just getting a taste of what it means to be poor in Africa? I pass the butchery, which looks like an alien dissecting room. Chunk upon chunk of meat, hanging from huge steel hooks, against white tiles. Overhead a huge flat-screen TV plays the thousandth rerun of the 1994 World Cup. Bafana Bafana. Mark Fish running again with the squad’s T-shirt stringed across his head. I know it so well I can see it in my mind in my drain. Next I enter this Indian shop, next to the entrance of Park Station. No Pick n Pay here. Pick n Pay, owned by Mr Raymond Ackerman, seems an obvious name for a supermarket chain where the rich man rules. We have no choice but to obey and pay as we make him and the Indian richer buying our staples. I feel the security cameras, visible and hidden. Electronic goods upon electric goods heaped in the window. Electric fans next to radios next to kettles. Near the door at the corner stands a young sheik with a roundish face in a flowing white robe with a turban to match. His face creases into an automatic smile, with eyes that do not really see me. As if I’m a shack, in a street of shacks, in a township of shacks, in a world of shacks, that all look the same. “Hallo, baba!” He shoots it off like a doorman at The Ritz. I pass him stiffly. I do not return the favour. Today I am a nononsense guy with an attitude to boot. A warm tinkling of excitement begins at the base of my spine and spreads over my ribs to my stomach as I go straight to the glass cabinet in front of the Indian. I go and stand over it, my lips pursed into concentration like a kid at a candy stall. Big is next to small. Long next to short. Thin-edged next to wide-edged. Hunting knives, fish knives, flick knives, okapis, stars, switchblades and Rambos. You name it and it is here. I once had a Rambo, black round handle, on top transparent with green markings round an inlaid compass. I also knew an 13
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SADF army knife. Inside it was a fishing wire and hooks. The blade rough-edged and toothed on one side, razor-sharp and smooth on the other side, coming in its own black sheath with a bar of flintstone thrown in for good measure. The perfect survival knife – just a pity we ain’t in the bush but in a concrete jungle. The homeless seem a legitimate target for the homed to vent frustrations and anger and go hobo bashing – the very young and very old bearing the brunt of these attacks. If the gluesniffing street kids live long enough we become wizened hobos, but along the way, when our bones are still strong, we have a phase where we become what our persecutors want us to be. Slippery, lithe, armed criminals, but mostly for survival. Add rich white men and also not-so-rich ones using young homeless boys for sex, sometimes bought, more often forced. I have come in here many times before, just to glance over the knives but mostly to look at the cameras. Single-Lens Reflex, disposable, digital, they all feed my not-so-secret ambition to become a journalist. And just as many times I have exited empty-handed after realising it would be next to impossible to stay on the street, dragging around a big or even a small camera – I might just draw unnecessary attention. The Indian keeps his eyes on me but need not worry, the cabinet is locked, I can only pick up the knives in my mind. My eyes trail down the wooden brown-handled knives with shining inlaid steel patterns. Seven stars, three stars, okapis. These are the knives I know. These are the knives of home. The practised moves of Mr Knife dance through my brain, sending the messages to my hands and feet, feint this way, pretend you’re making the obvious move, retract, slash at this one’s ear, at that one’s thigh. The brown-and-chrome okapi is still under the glass but I feel the round end in my palm and prise it open, feeling the blade against my thumb. My eyes slip to the slimmer ones, green, red and blue lines crisscrossed across the body, R24.99. Expensive. Jissus! Everything over R20 is expensive to me. The black one is broad but looks 14
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blunt. I shrug them off one by one. I do not want a flippant knife, I just want one that can do the job but, more important, one I can hide, have on me at all times. I leave the shop, lock myself in the public toilet near the railway line and extract one rolled-up hundred-rand note from the elastic in my underpant. I re-enter the shop, call the Indian, show him the colour of my money and point at the smallest, thinnest okapi that can be slipped into the sole of my shoe but that has enough length in the blade to go deeper than skin deep. With a wooden handle I can get a grip on, it can be twisted to do some damage. Later, as I cross the bridge, I feel the knife in one pocket and my blunt pencil in the other. I scramble down the bank behind the railway, sit down with my back against a pylon, and my mind goes back to the writing group. To return or not to return. I take out the knife, flick it open with my thumb and begin to shave the tip of the pencil, which flakes away in curly pieces. Dammit, let me go spend the change from my knife and let the questions settle themselves. ✪ The knife is sitting snuggly at the base of my foot. It is now about 6 pm and an hour ago I cancelled going to the Universal Church in the centre of town to get my evening food. Instead I have decided to go straight to the Writers’ Workshop at Longsbank, here in town, which will start any time soon. But at the last minute, deep inside my drain, I say what the heck and make Poor Man’s Pub my destination. I pull on my red-brown leather jacket, a real beauty, one that even fashionable white kids would love to own. It has become a part of me. It’s not just a good-looker, but a raincoat and warm too. And my yellow slacks. Yellow is a stupid colour for a homeless boy, but I wash them in the university fountain with Cold Water Omo, apartheid’s super detergent, a must for shack-dwellers and the hot-water-geyserless. I may be homeless 15
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but that doesn’t mean I have to be dirty, hard as it may be to stay clean. Seems a good night to widen my repertoire of drinking holes and maybe get lucky on the squeeza side. Poor Man’s Pub, you could say, is in my neighbourhood and it doesn’t take me long to foot it. But today it kind of gets me down. Don’t want to think of this as my second home. And there are no squeezas in sight so after a beer I head on down to Happiness at Night, just down the block, for those who have no intention of sleeping. Is it my breath or my general attire that keeps the squeezas away? Two of them, one a bit on the old side and the other one cute and young, sit near me but are clearly not biting. Don’t give up that easily, I tell myself and, after three beers at Happiness, I drop in at Chicken King. But still no luck. When I open my eyes, my head is flat on the grimy pine table. I look up at the clock. 2 am! How was I able to sleep through this noise? The pub is dark but the jukebox and booze are keeping us there. Dancing, people chatting, figures moving in and out of the interior, smoke curling up towards the ceiling. Another beer will do as the jukebox guzzles my money. I play ‘Kuse Jozi, msawawa’ (It is in Jo’burg, my friend) over and over, a track about this city that has me in its grips but that somehow makes me nostalgic for home. This night has given me all it can but I am not keen to go back to my drain. I decide to take a turn in town, just to beat the pavements with my soles. I walk and try to ward off this hangover-to-be. The knife is under my left foot. Being right handed, keeping it on the left means it is easier to get it out in a hurry. I walk and walk and walk, not really in the city but in my stride and thoughts. Are we all drunk all the time, one way or another? Raindrops glistens from the tar road in the dark, puddles reflecting light. A cold wind hits me in my face and automatically my hands shove deeper into my pockets. Lampposts sway to the high winds. I turn again into one of those dark narrow streets. Up ahead lays the park in Rissik Street. On the curb next to the park, I 16
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pass small iron benches bolted to the ground, now only lumps of darkness with metallic glints. Further on, steely contraptions and cages, which hawkers sell from during the day, are fastened with heavy chains and locks to the iron railings of the park fence. I see occasional patches of cardboard with a body asleep, ready to wake and catch the early-morning trade. Far across the park, red-and-yellow fires, figures dotted around, staring into the flames. Surely that kind of hypnosis is healthier than all this booze? I walk with slow, languid steps, sometimes losing a footing but recapturing it in time. The bridge, slightly humped, stretches up ahead of me. They now call it Mandela Bridge, meant to link two worlds. The decaying city world, going to rot since the whites moved their businesses out to Sandton, the New World. Braamfontein is the island between the two and the place I call home. Just as I turn the corner, my head jerks up in time to see two youthly figures running towards me, in my direction but at an angle going towards the other side of the street. Can’t see much of them but they don’t have the look of street kids. Seem better dressed. The one who is taller and leaner is slightly ahead of the other. As the leaner one puts more distance between him and his friend, his friend takes an abrupt right turn darting down the steps to a lower road. I pull my gaze back to my front, and instantly my eyes are met by two other figures, security guards in grey, storming down on me. As they reach me, they part like the Red Sea, only to rejoin behind me and continue running. My heart has skipped a beat and something tells me to also turn around and run, because by now I have a pretty good idea what is going on. But I am drunk and my reactions sluggish. I tell myself, I have done nothing wrong, I have no reason to run, and I trudge on. My gaze is straight ahead but my heart beats like a wild bird. In front of me, I see a lanky figure in what I perceive to be the same greyish security clothes. I see him turn around 17
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the corner of this building, and dart across the street in the direction of the first two suspects. Almost immediately he is followed by another security guy from a different security company. Here in Jozi, crime capital of the world, security is big business and guards come in all colours of uniform, but their radios and walky-talkies are linked to the same channel. I can make him out through the poor glow of the light in front of me, his dark-blue clothes, metal shining here and there, a maroon beret on top of his head, and he is bearing down on me. Just in front of me, he comes to a sudden halt and barks, “Yima lapho, izandla phezulu!” You over there, hands up! I notice deep initiation scars around his cheeks and eyes. My first response is to almost laugh. Is this guy serious? Even the others passed me, taking me for what I am, an innocent drunk. I look at him with what I know to be a perplexed look on my face. But again something tells me to consider his demand more carefully. I lift my hands slowly. “Iya phantsi!” he screams. Down! “Go get the others,” he commands the other guards, who then make off down the road. A small, almost sarcastic laugh escapes my lips, and the black and shiny thing in his hand whirrs in slo-mo as I turn my head away but still catch the blow before my face meets the ground. Palms slap the cold cement as I go down, thousands of cold shock waves passing through my arms and shoulders before entering the highway of my spine. I want to recoil and hit back but I kill that impulse at its birth. People generally come to be misunderstood in these situations. My knife beckons but the guy is hitting at me like a grandmother sweeping the floor. I expect he and the pack behind him are all armed and will kill me if they see Mr Knife. Just a fraction of a second after my chin touches the ground on the second bounce, another numbing kick connects with the side of my jaw, which swings my head in the opposite direction. 18
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