Mrs. Hillster shrugged her shoulders.
“I can’t understand you. The dead are always alone. Think about yourself. You’re still young. You could make a new life for yourself.”
Me, still young? I get the impression I’m over a thousand years old. I am a tree whose branches have been broken by hurricanes, whose leaves have been ripped off by great gales. I am naked, I am stripped bare.
Mrs. Hillster lowered her voice as if she were broaching a sordid subject.
“But that’s not what I wanted to know. Have the police got any further with their inquiry?”
Rosélie shook her head.
“My God!” Mrs. Hillster sighed. “It’s awful! Despite his failings, Stephen didn’t deserve to die like he did.”
No, of course not! No man deserves to die, cut down like a dog on a filthy sidewalk between two rows of garbage cans. But what failings are you talking about?
Mrs. Hillster shrugged her shoulders.
“Who among us can boast of being perfect? Don’t take exception to what I’m about to say. Stephen was too domineering. He made people do what he wanted; he manipulated them. Especially you.”
This was the first time she had dared criticize Stephen. She had always been all smiles, all billing and cooing and flirting despite her nearly seventy years.
Distraught, Rosélie walked out into the glare and din of Buitengragt.
The street disappeared between antique shops with massive Dutch facades and shopping malls of the flashier and more fake American style. Nausea was welling up inside her. What had Mrs. Hillster meant? It’s a fact she never contradicted Stephen. But to speak of manipulation!
She darted into a taxi and had herself driven to the Steve Biko High School.
It was midmorning and the driver made no objections.
Khayelitsha was one of the most monstrous legacies of apartheid. It loomed up out of the sands of False Bay like a formidable bantustan erected at the gates of Cape Town: the coveted, inaccessible, and forbidden city. It had been designed to place the workers under house arrest as far away as possible as well as detain the undesirables looking for a job. The long-term plan was for the population of Langa, Nyanga, and Guguletu to be uprooted and for all the blacks to be herded into Khayelitsha and kept there by force. Rosélie noted that the area had been somewhat humanized since her last visit with Stephen some two years earlier. The new regime had built entire districts of modular houses, painted garish orange, green, and blue like blocks of Lego. A cultural center looking like a fairground stall stood at one of the corners of Albert Luthuli Square. All the bric-a-brac of South African craftwork was on display there: spears, wall hangings, and plates decorated with multicolored pearls. In spite of everything, the overall sadness grabbed you by the throat.
Remodeled after apartheid, the Steve Biko High School was not exactly welcoming. Not surprising the kids try to set fire to their schools with such architecture! A watchtower straight out of an American prison film stood in the center of a quadrangle of grayish buildings encircling a bare playground. It was as if the shrubs and flowers that thrived in the residential districts of Cape Town refused to grow in Khayelitsha. It was recess time. The older pupils cramped into combat-style fatigues were jostling with the younger ones dressed in just as unattractive bottle green uniforms.
The principal’s name was Olu Ogundipe. Years earlier, on the eve of his arrest for his political opinions, he had had to flee his native country of Nigeria and escape to Jamaica, his wife’s home island. Alas! Jamaica was no longer the land of the maroons. Even the Rastas strumming their guitars amid the smell of ganja smoke have long ceased caring about Ras Tafari and Marcus Garvey. Olu realized this soon enough. His Marxist positions aroused the anger of the authorities and he was sent packing. So South Africa seemed to him to be the best place to stand up to capitalism and racism. But although he was a well-known figure throughout Cape Town and the provinces, it wasn’t because of his political essays or commendable causes; it was because his scarred and bearded face appeared on advertisements for a mobile phone company. At crossroads and along the highway he proclaimed convincingly:
“Always keep in touch with a Nokia T193.”
Or else:
“Nokia T193
Use it for pleasure, for thrills, and for the Internet.
Use it to telephone as well.”
His office was the very image of a museum of the black world, with its dozens of photos stuck to the walls. Rosélie patiently endured a homily on the African renaissance that perhaps was taking its time, but would eventually strike the white world with the violence of a thunderbolt, the favorite instrument of Shango, the Yoruba god. Olu Ogundipe ventured a comparison: the South Africans after apartheid were like the Haitians after their independence in 1804. They needed time to build a nation. Then they would be an example to the world.
Like the Haitians?
He gestured with contempt at the Cape Tribune, spread out on his desk, Fiela’s photo on the front page.
“Just look at that! Why do they make such a fuss over that woman. She’s mad. They should bring back the death penalty for cases like hers. What image does she give our country? Our newspapers remain in the hands of those who want to demoralize the reader and discredit the government. If I were Minister for Information I’d close down the lot of them.”
Straightaway he conveyed his condolences, for he had known the deceased very well, that she knew. But between the lines of praise and pity there crept a subtle denunciation that the honorable Stephen Stewart had deserved his sad end. Wasn’t he a European and the worst of species? The English species. Some are fond of saying that the English were the first to abolish the slave trade, then slavery, the first to decolonize Africa and the Caribbean. Quite the opposite. If you thought about it, British foreign policy was one of the most devious and destructive there is. In between his anathematizing, Rosélie managed to convey the purpose of her visit. She wanted to present Stephen’s computer as a gift to the school. Olu seemed distressed, like Mrs. Hillster a few hours earlier. To fight nepotism and corruption the Minister for Education had just decreed that school principals were forbidden to accept gifts from individuals. These should be deposited with a state bank, the CND, which would then allocate them to schools and colleges according to their needs. He could not personally accept this precious souvenir from the honorable Dr. Stewart. Furthermore, if she deposited it with the CND, it would probably fall into the wrong hands. Rosélie, truly paranoid, got the impression he was hiding behind an administrative pretext and he wanted nothing more to do with Stephen.
There was nothing else to say. She accepted a cup of coffee that triggered a speech on the comparative merits of the plant. He only drank Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. Nothing like the adulterated arabica used in electric coffeemakers. Then Olu broached a subject that was dear to his heart: the decline of South African literature by black writers. Some attributed their silence to the end of apartheid, which had deprived them of subject matter. He was of another opinion. South African writers persisted in flouting their mother tongues, wrongly called national languages, since nations held them in contempt. So what is a mother tongue? A language that expresses added meaning, a language that expresses secret places of the heart, a language that expresses the inexpressible! If she only knew how many masterpieces were produced annually in Nigeria in the vernacular!