The World Beneath (11 page)

J
oshua lies on his stomach in the dust under a thorn tree and throws pebbles at a stump. It is searingly hot. And he has nothing to do. Nothing! He broods, chin on cupped hands. He has not seen Sindiso since arriving a week ago. They hadn’t stayed long in Mozambique, with its cows and its huts and its green mountains. Now they are in Angola, in a training camp for the soldiers, Sindiso has explained.

This camp is in a scrubby landscape, with thorn trees and dust as far as the eye can see. There is a house on a hill in the center of it: an old farmhouse. Joshua sleeps in a little room at the back, a storeroom with a high window next to the maid’s room, where Mama Bongani lives.

She gives him
mielie-pap
in the mornings. As far as he can see, she is as busy as his mother used to be, looking after the men. She has to cook and clean and wash. She looks tired. When he tries to talk to her, she shoos him away gently, as if he were a persistent puppy.

This morning she asks him to help. “Here, take these, Joshua,” she says. “They are too heavy for me.” It is early in the camp, and she has done the daily wash. Joshua lifts the wet sheets from the tub and twists them to squeeze out the water. He pins them onto the clothesline, struggling not to dip the corners in the dirt.

She joins him. “Joshua,” she says. “Do you miss your family?”

“Yes, Mama,” says Joshua.

“This is no place for a boy like you,” says Mama Bongani. “You should be with your mother. She needs you.”

Joshua continues to lift and peg the heavy sheets. He hesitates. “Mama,” he asks, “Mama, where are your children?”

She puts down the big basket in the dirt and looks at him and sighs. She has a
doek
on her head, like his mother, only hers is bright yellow, not white. “Joshua, my babies are all grown and gone. My sons have gone to fight. One of them is in prison. My daughter is a maid in Johannesburg. That is why I am here. There is no future for any of us until we are all free.

“That is why I know that your mother is missing you. Just because your babies are grown does not mean you do not miss them.”

Joshua looks up at her; she is framed against the sunlight, and he cannot see her face. “I am sure my mother would be happy that I am here, helping you.” He feels a sudden impulse to hug her. “I’ll get the other sheets,” he says.

In the distance, beyond a stand of trees, he can hear someone shouting and the men shouting back as they march. He is not allowed to come too close. It could be dangerous if they are shooting. They are also learning to use bombs, Sindiso has explained.

“When they are trained, they will be going back to South Africa to plant bombs in military places,” he said. “When you leave here, Joshua, you are never to talk of what you have seen here. It would place us all in great danger.”

“When can I learn to shoot?” he asked Sindiso, leaning back against a tree. He lined up an imaginary sight with his right hand holding the trigger close to his eye, and his left arm held out as straight as a gun.

Sindiso laughed. “No, you are too young, Joshua. We do not make child soldiers here. Your job is to do your schoolwork.”

Now Joshua broods, alone under the tree. Trying to do his schoolwork on his own is hard.

He still thinks of it, the terrifying journey north, the searing air of Mozambique, the long, hot drive to this camp. He is assailed by a cramping grief whenever he has any time to himself. He wishes he could get a big rusty old key and turn back the clock. To see his mother and his little sister and brother. And to make Tsumalo and Sipho alive again.

He is so angry.

But for now he is helpless. And bored. He is the only boy in the camp. He rolls over onto his back and looks up through the thorn tree’s scraggy, spiky branches at the relentless blue of the sky; it is almost too bright to look at. His eyes are watering, and he squeezes them shut. His clothes are covered in dust. Mama Bongani will be angry. It will make more work for her.

He opens his eyes, and a face swims into view between him and the sky. It is smiling. It is white. It’s a girl’s face. He sits up in surprise. He has not seen any white people here.

“Are you bored?” asks the face. It has sea-green eyes and long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. “Come with me.” He jumps up and follows obediently. Her name is Bonny. She is from Jo’burg, she says. She is holding his hand like his mother used to do. Suddenly his eyes fill with tears. She glances down at him but says nothing.

“Listen,” she says. Joshua sees a big man leaning forward. He is sitting on a tree trunk. The men gathered around him fall silent.

Joshua stands at the edge of the circle with Bonny. The big man has a big smile. He looks open and friendly. His audience is rapt; he holds them in the palm of his hand. He is telling a story about a herder boy. Then he looks up and sees Joshua. His broad face creases again into a smile, the eyes almost disappearing. “Come!” he commands.

“Go!” whispers Bonny, releasing him.

Joshua is nervous. But he is drawn and pushed forward by many hands until he stands by the man, in the crook of his arm.

“Now, do you see this boy? This boy is why we are fighting. And we are going to win. Are we going to win?”

“Amandla,”
comes the reply.
“Amandla.”
Power.

Joshua feels uneasy. He can feel the heat coming off the man. And something else: it is the absolute, keen ambition of him, the intensity of his concentration on drawing those around him into his orbit. He wriggles free and pushes back into the crowd.

Bonny is waiting. She gives him a grin and holds out her hand.

“Who is he?” he asks.

“His name is Jacob,” she says. “He used to be a herder boy himself. When the change comes, he will be in the government.”

W
ith Bonny, he works an hour a day on his reading. She helps him to write a letter to his mother, carefully couched in vague terms. He is “enjoying his holiday,” and he is “keeping up with his lessons.” It won’t be posted from here, Bonny says. It will be passed from hand to hand until it can be sent from Johannesburg.

“What about Tsumalo?” he asks. “What did he do? He wouldn’t tell me.”

“He was involved in the labor union movement,” Bonny explains. “He was working to get workers the right to strike. They were making banners for a march when the police came. They can keep you in prison for a long time without putting you on trial. And on the night he escaped, he killed a guard.”

Joshua feels a cold hand close around his throat. He looks at Bonny.

“He had to do it,” she says. “They were torturing him.”

“Yes,” says Joshua. “But how did he get out?”

“One of the black prison guards helped him. He lent him an old guard’s uniform, and one afternoon when they were working in the grounds of the prison, he managed to slip away.

“Tsumalo hid in a tree, and when the guard walked under it, he jumped him and got the gun off him. When the others heard the shot, they thought it was Tsumalo who had been killed.”

Joshua is silent. He doesn’t like to think of Tsumalo killing someone. But he doesn’t like to think of him being tortured either.

He picks up a stick and begins to scratch it in the sand. They are under the thorn tree, looking down on the camp.

No child is allowed to become a soldier; in this, the struggle is different to those in other countries, Bonny says. It is important for children to get an education — something they are denied under apartheid.

“When you are grown up, you can decide. Only then. Then you can join
Umkhonto we Sizwe
,” says Bonny. It means “Spear of the Nation.” He likes the words. They make him feel safe. These are the soldiers who are being trained in the camp and will go back to South Africa on bombing missions. They are the military wing of the African National Congress, which is fighting to overturn the apartheid government.

“What are you doing here, Bonny?” Joshua asks. He does not say “because you are a white girl,” but that’s what he means.

“Joshua, there are a lot of young people like me who believe in the struggle,” she says. “Some of them stay in South Africa, and some come out of the country to train,” she explains.

She is twenty-one; she left as soon as she finished her degree at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape. There were terrible forced removals to the area, she had told him. “People were dumped in the veld with nothing but a standpipe for water. They starved. Two out of three children died before they reached two years old, Joshua. Two out of every three!

“I knew then that I would have to leave,” says Bonny. And she looks away. “How could I live in a country that could do that to its own people?

“If I stayed, I would be supporting the system just by being there. Now I have left, I can help bring it down.” She is in the camp to train; she will go back soon and live underground until she is needed.

Joshua is astonished that white people are training too. “There is the world that everyone sees,” explains Bonny. “That is the world of white privilege. Many white people think,
Why would we want to change that world?
But then there is also the world beneath that one, the secret place where we operate. And because we are white, there are places we can go and things we can do that are easier for us — much easier.”

She gives Joshua a hug. “Things will change,” she says. “It will take a long time, but it will happen.”

And she tucks her shiny brown hair behind her ear and smiles at him — sadly, he thinks.

The next morning Bonny shakes him awake. It is early and still dark, and he is deep in a dream about home: he has his little sister and brother, one in each arm, and they are sitting outside his grandparents’ house in the evening sunshine. “Come! Come now!” Bonny commands. He jumps out of bed, grabs his sweater, and runs.

They sit under a tree as the red sun rises slowly behind the black thorn trees and its cold beams find their shivering bodies. Bonny is crying.

“What is it? What is it?” he repeats.

“They’ve killed him,” she says simply. “He’s dead.”

“Who’s dead?” he asks.

“Steve Biko. He was the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. He was a great man. He was arrested last month. He was tortured, Joshua. And they drove him a thousand kilometers to Pretoria with a terrible head wound — naked — chained in the back of a truck. And now he has died.”

And she takes his hands in hers. “Murdered, Joshua.”

“Like Sipho,” he says.

“Yes,” she answers gently. “Like Sipho.”

Joshua can’t get the thought out of his head. Chained like an animal in the back of a van, driven all those miles in terrible pain.

Bonny shows him a small picture torn from a newspaper. “Bantu Stephen Biko,” says the caption. He has wide-set eyes and a level gaze. It’s a handsome face.

The news has given Joshua a cold feeling in his stomach, a spreading feeling of dread that he wakes with every day and that reminds him of how he would wake every morning after the news of Sipho; with a nameless fear, but without remembering why. Only once he is fully awake does grief hit him with renewed force.

He says a prayer for his mother and his family, for Sipho and for Tsumalo, every night when he goes to bed. Now he adds Biko’s name to his list.

And lying there in the dark, he swears to himself that when he grows up, he too will be a freedom fighter. He knows that there are thousands of men like Biko who have died at the hands of the police, men whose names he may never know. “It’s too much. It’s too much,” he whispers to himself.