On that night, eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police.
When Laurie and I got to the township entrance, there was no official in sight. Laurie slowed the car, swaying to the side of the sandy road which had no curb. “Do we go straight through?”
“No, we might get stopped farther on, and I want to be able to say we’ve got permission to be here.” I knew the native policemen who did duty at the entrance; I might not know those whom we were likely to meet inside. Laurie hooted, a serene, smoothly accented bleat that was what one would have expected to come from a car like his, and the familiar, fat, light-colored police boy came out of the administrative building with a sort of slow-motion skipping movement, exaggerating his concern at being found absent from his post. He greeted me, grinning with excitement. “We’re a bit out of order here today,” he said, proud of his English. “May we go in?” I said. His eyes took up the reflection of the car lights, which, with the smokiness of the location atmosphere added to the gathering darkness, Laurie had suddenly found it necessary to switch on. “Well — you’re from the Welfare, isn’t it? Mr. Clark, he’s nearly a resident here!”—he was delighted with his own humor. “Of course, we’ve got instructions, no Europeans, and so on. … But for you it’s all right.” “We’re going straight to the Center, Mr. Clark’s there waiting for us,” I agreed, and he saluted us on.
It is always surprising to find how much darker an African township is at night; far darker than anywhere else where there are houses, and people are living. In a European quarter, even if there is a street where the lamps are sparse and most of the houses happen to be in darkness, there is a general lightening diffusion from all the other lights in the city, so that you forget how thick darkness really is. Already that thick dark was curling up and wrapping about the small low houses; lighted windows showed irregularly on either side like cigarette tips glowing. The first street we drove along seemed quieter than was usual at this hour, but when we turned left again into another street as dim and quiet, I noticed a paraffin-tin fire outside one of the houses. The cooking pot on it was boiling over and over, bubbling and streaming down into the coals. The house was closed and quite dark; a fan of red light from the fire wavered over it. Farther on there was a strange pale low light that seemed to breathe rather than burn. When we drew level, it was a candle alight behind a rag of curtain in another dark closed house. As I looked at it with a momentary pleasure — the light of a candle was something else one didn’t really know — a corner of the rag was looped back by a very small black hand and the faces of two African children watched us go past.
When we came to the Apostolic Faith church, we seemed to have reached the normal evening location clamor, the rising, muffled blare of shouts, talk, yells and laughter which was faded and far off above the streets we had left.
And then we were in the heart of it. That is the only way I can describe it, the way I shall always remember it. Shocking, splitting, like the explosion of maniacal loudness that assaults you when you turn a radio volume full on by mistake. The awful heart of that endless shout which rises from the throat of a location at night.
Not thirty yards away a crowd was bellowing round a telephone booth, the only telephone booth in the whole township. They butted and screamed, the whole solid wall of their bodies — solid and writhing as a bank of fish in a net — caving forward. Seconds before I saw, before I understood, at the instant at which that sound smashed on our heads, I snatched at Laurie’s arm with such clawing horror that the car swerved to the side and stalled. He turned on me, astonished. My roughness seemed to have startled him more than what was happening. “What are you doing, what are you doing?” he shouted, but his voice was faint against the din. Above the mass of the crowd things were waving, poles or bars, I shall never know, but heavy things that were being held upright with difficulty, drunkenly, and that fisted down on the little conical tin roof of the booth so that it tore and fell in like a piece of silver paper. The crowd seized on the booth as if it could be shaken into speech. A high-pitched yell sent them back; something that might have been a railway sleeper heaved into the air and then bricks and plaster gave way and fell into the bellowing. The telephone box with the receiver swinging flew out over heads. Part of the door — some of the glass panes must still have been unbroken because in the instant of its passage through the air, I saw a watery zigzag — broke up as it hit the wall of a house. And then a short man in big white shoes (I can see those shoes now, I could almost describe the shape, the rather pointed toes, though I know it seems impossible that I really could have seen them so clearly) shot out of the crowd and picked up the telephone. Yelling, he held it aloft like a head on a pike and he raced over to the small municipal building — it was the depot where milk was sold at special rates — and smashed it against the wall. An accolade of stones followed his action in horrible applause. The windows of the place smashed, the door was kicked in. At the same time one of the stones missed its mark and pricked the bubble of the only street light.
Laurie was sitting with his great heavy arm stretched out pressed back against me like a barrier, as if he were restraining me from jumping out of the car. Behind it I breathed like an animal that has been caught and is being held down for branding. I thought I should burst with horror. I do not think I was afraid, I had no room for fear because I was so mad with horror. Again I was overwhelmed by an emotion whose existence I had not ever thought about, every bursting blood vessel pushed full with a racing blood I had not counted in the emotional scope of my life. Everyone fears fear; but horror — that belongs to second-hand experience, through books and films.
Even while the darkness doused the crowd a new light came up, and with it an ecstatic shrill scream, a note out of the normal range of the human voice. The crowd drowned it hoarsely, cutting across it with rasping throats: the municipal office was burning. People were running past us all the time now, summoned by the success and passion of the flames. The firelight ran excitedly all over them. And I saw that the owner of the scream was a woman who stood out in the road apart, a woman with a hump that must be a baby tied on her back. She leaned forward with her hands on her thighs and sometimes the scream was only a contortion of her face, sometimes it jetted out against the massive bellowing. Other sounds, too, came in flashes of lucidity out of the confusion. The deep panting of the shapes which ran past us. I felt a cringed stiffening in Laurie’s arm and the side of his body that was pressed against my side, every time this sound was flung to us — so personal as opposed to the anonymity of the bellowing, in passing. Laurie was afraid. He was not horrified, he was only terribly afraid. I do not mean that he was cowardly, but that he had been in a war, he knew what men were like, and it was not what was shown to be in them that affected him, but the practical calculation and fear of what this might threaten toward others. “All right. It’s all right,” I remember he kept saying. “All right. It’s all right.”