Some man who recognised Lesego gathered him among men telepathic awareness brought from behind what was left of shacks and houses. Nothing appeared intact, not as if explosives had fallen indiscriminately but wrecked by individual intention. This place, invaders have simply moved in on local people living there perhaps years and somehow become settled enough to acquire possessions. Probably gleaned stuff dumped by white suburbans who have too much clutter, or stolen by the jobless turned housebreakers — no refugee could have brought with him the old upright piano lying among its torn-out white keys, a creature that has lost its teeth. A spaza shop which had the enterprise of displaying special offers with grinning client posters as in the supermarkets gaped on empty shelves and the spilling of loot, trampled, apparently not worth taking. Someone was picking over the remains of a TV — no electricity here, but television can be run on a car battery — the few cars were not more damaged than they normally would have been — windscreens one-eyed with patches, autograph dents from daily encounters on that single road; the owners must have driven them off to a safer place when violence began brewing potently.
The Zimbabweans didn’t flee, this time, this place, they resisted the violence of rejection with violence. The men about Lesego indeed must think he’s brought someone who’ll make the world hear their story of invasion, so it has to be told in a language the white man with him will understand; what’s vehement must be sent out in English. The voice fired from the coming and going babble of the group. — Who is give them pangas and guns, where they do get, who give them knives from butcher shop, who paying those people come to kill us, they want this our place. — A woman lifted a wail that drew theirs from under the black shawls of her old women companions. And suddenly a note with the cadence of Afrosoul soared somewhere on the low horizons of destruction. Whose voice. She’s just one of those who’re growing up in this place; an inspiration not interruption — Where’re our jobs they take. There’s jobs at the paint factory, the building going on over there-there Jeppe Street, the cleaners for the hotel — those people they take our jobs, they take any small pay, the bosses don’t want our wages they must pay us the union says—
Lesego breaks away with one of the men and signals. — He asks us to go with him. — The shrug for the man’s privacy. He questions him under his breath.
Too difficult to follow the gist of the isiZulu that follows; so without being able to make out the purpose, just be an appendage of Lesego. Seeing more ‘on the ground’. Women have three-legged pots standing in fires, children are bowling, quarrelling over turns with the wheels of a bicycle corpse. Another woman, backside assertive, is stirring cement rather than food alongside a man patching bricks to close gaps broken in a house that had a luxury of a wall instead of corrugated tin and cardboard. There’s an instinct in human settlement to be aligned as if you were in streets but some shacks are faced away, at the choice of the individual, from what is the rough conformation of a line of occupation; that’s the freedom of destitution. Lesego calls his greeting to men swinging rhythmical hammer blows on what’s left of a scrap-metal roof and they call back cheerful with the acknowledgement. There are everywhere underfoot — kick aside to get along — the twisted plastic containers of whatever, cigarette stubs, crumpled publicity handouts, beer cans — only in greater accumulation than what is shed to the gutters of formal living in the city.
Here at the shacks there’s no municipal service to pick it up. Why should the parents of kids teach them not to throw away trash when their home is made of trash. — So they’re not to be allowed to learn self-respect? — Not even that. She’s not there with him but often when he’s with others it’s as if she’s presenting him with unexpected aspects of himself. And sometimes he’s giving her some of herself she’s not aware of.
A shebeen coterie although they’re in what are obviously rescued chairs from somewhere, each different with a lopsided leg or a seat replaced by double cardboard, drink beers from the bottle, maybe this battered shed is or was a shebeen, it’s withdrawn, can’t say protected from whatever’s happened to it, by a tarpaulin as a devout Muslim woman hides behind a veil the compensatory visions for the ugliness of life. Children rat-scatter; and there are a few hens, not much shattered glass you’d expect of violence, because shacks generally don’t have windows but there are shard reflections from smashed mirrors, whatever else people can’t have, it’s clear from mirrors seen still to survive in wrecked shelters, hung up somehow, men and women must have their image, to shave and (young Afrosoul voice) make up; have sight of themselves not just as others choose to see them.
The man stops evidently come to what he’s making for. It’s a shack like any other but iron railing, the kind of screen put up to protect a store front in a risky street stands propped over what would be the entrance, and some piece of broken furniture hung with a cloth image of the President in leopard-skin regalia blinds anyone from being able to see inside. A woman with the facial bone structure recording she was once beautiful (as Jabu the lawyer is beautiful) interferes with Lesego’s man shaking the bars for attention. — They say there’s somebody very sick, that’s why you mustn’t worry the people — The man jerks a shoulder to back her off in reproaches. A voice comes from in there, questions, and gets an answer in their shared language that satisfies identity. A man pregnant with a belly that means his belt only just holds up his pants below it at the crotch appears round the side of the curtain. He signs to approach and heaves the iron screen sideways, it’s not flab, that belly, at an angle for the arrivals to push in.
There’s a double bed with nobody lying in it. A young woman tending a baby among jars, mugs and a head of cabbage on the table. Confusion. A shack is a dwelling-place all purpose in one, a motorbike, piled clothing, mobile phone, stroller strung with limp toys, a car seat has two neat white pillows on it, must double as a bed.
Lesego was introduced to the man who bore his belly so confidently, names, elaborate greeting exchanged. And Lesego presents — Steve, my good friend. — The man might or might not have been reassured by what came from a white, the traditional handshake — forearm grasp. The young woman with the baby on her hip drew up: and as if now remembered — My daughter. — Lesego asked the name as he greeted her and touched the baby in salute. — This’s Steve. We teach at the university together.—
— Oh great, that’s nice.—
What to say. — Are you all right? It must have been terrible for you.—
— They were trying to get in but that iron — they tried and tried and there was such fighting in the street they got mixed up in it and went to another place, a woman we know just near us, she was killed.—
Her father is impatient with the platitudes of circumstance. He swings the belly to a stained blanket hanging from where the tin sheet of wall meets the tin roof and lifts it enough for the three men to see — a gap there; it’s open on a lean-to shed made of whatever, propped to the battered relic of a truck door. There’s a man standing. Looking straight at them, where he would have been thrust before they were let in past the storefront guard.
He’s a young man and he’s wearing one of those bold bright-patterned topknot balaclavas women sell among sweets and single cigarettes on city pavements this year. It crowns and covers — his identity? — over the ears and down to join under the jawbone.