The first scene represents a family is sitting around a table, early morning that has the remnants of a breakfast meal on it. It is slim pickings, a simple meal of bread and coffee, hot porridge. The mother and the daughters are clearing the table while the young men sit around the table. The father smokes a cigarette. The men are all sitting in their socks. Their shoes are lined up at the door ready to be shined. Then the mother irons the father’s shirt. Everyone is acting as if it just an ordinary day but the world has changed. There has been no talk of community and neighbourly love for months now.
Instead, it has be substituted by threads of evil, pockets filled with them. In the background, I can hear voices, shouts getting louder and louder, angrier, more and more fearful of attack, the foreshadowing of terror. I have never taken the time to believe in you, but I’m going to pray because I’m still here. We’re just ordinary people after all.
I can hear the sound of breaking things, a police whistle. So, we waited in our house, thinking, imagining of what was happening in the streets, not thinking, yet lost in our thoughts, slowly going out of my mind. Some people packed up their belongings crying, wailing, and screaming. I do not think I will ever forget that, the beauty in that aggression, that terrifying brutality, that terror. I sat watching it all unfold in front of my eyes in disbelief. I felt pensive. It fluttered deep down before it perched in my mind’s eye. People are surrendering to the blindfolded reality of it all, the finality, and the awful, awful decision that they are cut up about leaving their homes. South End looks like a ghost town at the end of the day. People are selling out charmed by the new lifestyle, new plots in the desolate Northern Areas. The words are there, with a racist forked-tongue they are waiting for freedom, they are waiting for us with bulldozers.
Just this morning we breakfasted on warm porridge. Now our table and chairs are fastened to a cart. I collected myself. How do you deal with the unlikely dilemma of racism? It does not come with a star that says you are a Jew, the swastika. I did not know how the day would unfold. Danfred made a joke out of it. ‘They’ll be coming down the street when they come.’ My mother’s face fell. There was no expression on my father’s face as he buttoned his shirt and tucked his white vest in. May was cold. Jennifer, the youngest, the baby of the family, our mother’s favourite washed the dishes. Her hair fell across her face. I just felt emotionally uninvolved from the removals, composed yet as if it was happening to a division of a tribe in another country. Pack of wolves, they are all barbarians with hate in their hearts. We will triumph. We will triumph in the end. One day we will have a black president. One day the majority will rule.
Ferdinand cleared his throat as he walked past me, his eyes bloodshot from drinking sweet wine with his friends late into the night. Ari (short for Aristotle) smoked a cigarette outside. ‘Hey, Romeo, be the lookout. Warn me if mummy or daddy comes out.’ I just nodded my head like a robot. He did not care. He didn’t care about the ‘forced removals’, ‘the Northern Areas’, about not looking back in anger and getting married was the last thing on his mind. He did not have a teacher’s certificate. All he cared about was girls. God, my brother was mad about them. He would go on and on about his latest. ‘She has such soft, angelic skin with a tan. She looked like an angel, had angel’s eyes. You could tell she had never been with a man before because it took some coaching for her to hold my hand. She tells me her brothers’ thinks I am a daft punk-act. Saint, or disciple, sinner or winner. Obedience to the cause, or do we submit to this rehearsal of death.
She should not be seen with me. She calls me a gentle man; I think it’s because I’m so gentle with her.’ The day the world as we knew it ended. The day I knew I had to get my act together I smelled it, the concrete, the steam coming off asphalt, the energy in the air was complex, complicated, a circle of the badly drawn something to talk about meeting foot traffic, thoughts, seeing the red substance of anger. Brick by brick, complete houses being smashed to tiny bits of rubble, windows shattering into pieces, glints, and I wondered to myself how the sky would look that night. Enough, I said, enough but it did not come to an abrupt end. A process (nothing intellectual about it, just the dynamo of pure unstoppable evil) progressed, that brainwashed people. It was a titanic movement, apartheid that seduced the people in power, their ego, their vanity and consciousness and let go of our ancestors, surrendered them.
