And they were delicious.
Better, really, than anything I had eaten in my life. This was meat in its original sense. It made me want to learn how to hunt.
When we were fully gorged and rubbing our stomachs and listening to the bats and the bugs, Javas told us his story.
Javas was not his real name. South Africa was not his country.
Art was a recent flourish.
He was born in a small village on the outskirts of the Tsholotsho district in Zimbabwe, and it was there that his father told him how his great-grandfather had been hung by his feet from the rafters of the shed and cooked alive by Mugabe’s Shona. It was one small episode. A tiny, almost forgotten sliver of tragedy in the wider river of blood that was the Ndebele extermination.
The image was etched into his father’s heart. The story was told and retold, the details sharper and clearer with each telling, a small boy’s horrified view through the corner cracks growing more stark, casting brighter, clearer light on the savagery every time.
The death of his great-grandfather was the crux of Javas’s family. His father rolled in it, in his anger towards Mugabe and the Shona. But he wasn’t a man able or willing to turn to politics. Instead he veered inward, rotting in booze and recriminations, losing his family along the way, his wife and offspring drifting away in ever-widening circles, without him.
Javas – Jabulani actually, at that time – grew up a quiet, unobtrusive middle child. Like all children of his geography and generation, by the time he hit puberty his ambition had expanded to incorporate Jozi as a logical antidote to living the rest of his life on, as he put it, a ‘sinister, abandoned farm’.
Even after Mugabe’s death, Javas wanted nothing more than to leave the country of his birth. While waiting, he turned himself into an adult in the bush, tracking and watching game, making fires, climbing trees, observing. Retrospectively it was, he said, one of the happiest times of his life.
Gerald grunted at this. I couldn’t tell whether it was affirmation or rejection. He slipped a few notches further down in his lounge chair, his face a mask.
Aged sixteen, having nursed his father out of his frothing, bitter deathbed and into his grave, Jabulani hugged his mother, punched his younger siblings on the arm and hit the road. Before he even got to the border crossing – he had intended to take the through-the-Kruger route – he met up with two teenagers en route to a game farm balanced on the tip of the triangle joining Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the furthest point of the transfrontier game reserve. They claimed work was available there. He followed them, and so began his five-year stint as a game ranger. He lasted less than six months at the first park (‘It was like school, but the pay was worse’) but developed the contacts necessary to get a gig at the Mukato Reserve, on the South African side. Here he became a genuine ranger, ferrying foreigners from camp to camp, leading night drives and bush walks, answering questions, and explaining spoors and nesting habits and who kills who and why. He stayed at Mukato for three years, and then was poached by a new reserve further south. Now working in the area of the Groot Letaba (he laughed again at his Afrikaans pronunciation, at the impossibility of rolling his tongue that far around anything), he was part of a more commercialised set-up, one of a crew of twenty or more rangers.
The hustle for clients, the constant push and pull over tips and pay, the strange and often bizarre divisions of labour (blacks carrying and cleaning, whites guiding and talking) ate his love for the bush and created a new and growing set of resentments and frustrations. It was, of course, never as simple as black and white. Instead, he had to negotiate a convoluted maze of relationships and vested interests, alliances and partnerships. He never quite figured out who was with whom, nor who owed whom what. What he did figure out was that he didn’t understand enough of what was going on.
Jabulani was paid half the wage the white rangers were earning, and less than what most of the blacks were making as well. He was also being cut out of the lucrative personalised bush tours for the German and Japanese tourists. A confrontation with management ended with his fist on Franz Calitz’s nose and a fast, calculated trot through the reserve and out over the fence, into Limpopo. He faded into the background of migrant farm slave labour, inching his way south-west to Jozi. They were looking for him, of course, but only with the lazy South African half eye. Still, Jabulani decided it would be prudent to change his name. He adopted Javas, and along with it a fictional Zulu heritage.
‘If you really want to vanish, like in the movies, you must be committed.’ He spoke directly to me when he said this. ‘If you really wanna keep a secret, you can’t tell nobody. Ever.’ As he told his story, I realised that Gerald and Tebza already knew, or had surmised, a lot of it. I was the only one who had no idea.
Slamming Franz Calitz on the nose was merely the spark. Something bubbling down near his toes drove him not only to get out of Zimbabwe but to leave his life, in its entirety, for good. Javas was hell-bent on starting from scratch. With the right approach he could redefine himself as South African and get away, permanently.
So he worked his way down to Jozi and into Hillbrow and the life of a nightclub bouncer and knee-breaker. He gymmed at the right place in town, he fought when necessary, he collected debts, he ducked knives and he broke bones, not only as part of his job, but also as part of his professional identity.
‘I never fought unless I had to,’ he said. ‘But when I did I made sure I klapped them proper.’ Javas snapped his fingers through the air to indicate the severity. ‘People have to know. Everyone must know.’
It was terrible, he said. The city. Life was dark and dangerous and filled with the stink of humanity. ‘Jozi is fucked. If you gonna survive, you have to become fucked too. Crazy like the city. Otherwise you go home.’ Eventually, though, once his credentials as a lethal cunt had been established, most of the hard work was done via inference. ‘The phone is your most powerful weapon. Once you have created the fear, you keep it, you own it, with the phone. Late night. Early morning. Lunchtime is worst. People are very afraid at lunchtime.’
We were like Out of Africa gone to Mars. Me, Meryl Streep, the confused Euro observing the locals, my impassioned white skin glowing while my mind failed. I was stretching, reaching hard to follow Javas’s story and his descriptions of his transition into Jozi life, constantly aware of the subtleties I had missed, and was still missing. Gerald’s and Andile’s – and, to a lesser extent, Teboho’s – laughs and clucks echoed tellingly. I didn’t have the experience or the language to appreciate the full scope of Javas’s humour, nor the true darkness of his venture.
But I could imagine.
And in my imagining, my perception of Javas, and of the people I was living with, morphed. I now saw the deeper lines on his face, the etchings of a man who had truly travelled. I also suddenly saw the lean muscle beneath his clothing. I watched the way he moved and realised the economy of his motion. Javas was a big guy. Javas was a tough guy.
And I had never noticed.
Art, I subsequently realised, is like that. It softens by association and implication. It renders the hard pliable. It creates gaps, gaping holes really, in possibility. As he released the last parts of his history, I began to see Javas himself as a work of African art. A fluid, changeable and dynamic form. A self-sculpture. A muscled metaphor for everything that is beautiful and fucked up on the road from Harare.