We Are Not Such Things (51 page)

After my failed expedition, I drove to Mzi’s house, passing, along the way, the Nofemela house, where Aphiwe was playing with a little girl who was wearing a purple shirt that said
YOUR BOYFRIEND LIKES YOU BUT HE LOVES ME.

Over on NY119, Mzi was cleaning up after the previous night’s stabbing, vacuuming the floor of the Spirit Horse, his beloved turquoise Toyota. At around ten the night before, a distant relative who lived down the road had hurled himself over Mzi’s high iron fence and landed on the brick stoop, calling out for help, his chest and stomach punctured nine times. The relative was a pleasant twenty-three-year-old who, despite spending his days smoking
tik,
had maintained his good looks, his strong, straight nose, and all his crooked teeth. He had, however, succumbed to the main habit of
tik
users, which was stealing.

On the afternoon before, the relative was at the pale yellow single-level house he shared with his extended family, just down the street from Mzi’s place. In the backyard, hanging on the wash line, he found two pairs of men’s trousers, which he plucked off the line and sold for three dollars at the nearest squatter’s camp. Those pants belonged to the boyfriend of his twenty-one-year-old niece, who did not take the loss of his clothing lightly. That evening, the boyfriend stabbed the perpetrator with a switchblade. After sustaining the wounds, the victim broke free and ran down the street to Mzi’s small family compound.

Mzi was concerned about a new mob-justice movement gaining popularity in the townships, where terrified or impotent police have long sat back and allowed black people to brutalize each other. During apartheid, police forces were feared as indiscriminate tools of a racist state. They raided the townships and routinely tortured prisoners, sending them home blind, deaf, or mad; some people disappeared entirely after a run-in with cops. A white cop named Barnard, who called himself Rambo of the Cape, trolled the streets of Gugulethu. Residents called him Vuil Barnard, or Dirty Barnard.

“A serial killer with a badge,” Mzi recalled.

“Whenever his car appeared on the shimmering horizon leading the yellow Casspirs, we knew: Someone dies today,” a victim testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, referring to the armored vehicles driven by security forces. “We will remember the man with the red scarf who shot dead our sons.”

“He just followed the rule,” Pikker told me once over coffee. “And the rule was, really, if you can justify it, you can do it.”

Today, over two decades after Mandela’s election, most of the police are black or colored, but the punishment they mete out is often no less brutal. Recently, in addition to their role in the Marikana platinum mine massacre, the cops had been in the news for tying a handcuffed twenty-seven-year-old Mozambican taxi driver to a police van and dragging him to his death before a panicked crowd in a township just outside Johannesburg. His crime: parking illegally. Vigilante-administered punishment was therefore a more popular type of justice, though typically disproportionate and vicious, and often mistakenly directed at innocent people.

Mzi had recently embarked on a campaign to keep NY111 and NY119 clear of the so-called neighborhood watch committees that roamed the dirt paths of a nearby settlement at night. They established an 8:30
P
.
M
. curfew, even for people returning from work, and burnished whips to punish those who broke the rules. He visited nearby communities, bearing a laminated newspaper article describing a mob murder in Khayelitsha, during which a nameless, faceless group had beaten an alleged young robber to a pulp and then locked him in a portable toilet, which the group doused with petrol and set alight as their victim wept. The article, entitled “Deathcrap,” included a colorful photo of the dead man’s dismantled shack below a less colorful photo of his ash-encrusted corpse. No arrests had been made. Mzi wanted to avoid such a gruesome scene on his streets. What if they set upon the wrong person?

With this in mind, Mzi got out of bed and approached the gate. The thief’s assailants were surrounded by women and children from the shacks and hostels down the road, demanding that he be ejected onto the street. They didn’t have much, and boys like this were always grabbing their phones, their shoes, even their furniture. Let the boy walk home and face the consequences of stealing! Thieves must be punished!

“Sorry, bhuti,” Mzi said to the man with the switchblade. “But I cannot allow you to kill this boy.”

The crowd protested.

“Hayi, bhuti
,
you don’t know the whole story!” they yelled.

“I don’t want to know,” Mzi said softly. “Go to your homes.”

Some of them swore at him, but sensing that he could not be persuaded, they ambled away in the end, and nobody held a grudge the next day.

“Why were they cross with you?” I asked. “Did they want justice served, as they saw it?”

“No, they didn’t want justice,” Mzi said, shaking his head. “They have become accustomed to violence. To them, it is like watching a live movie. They were angry because I ended the movie before the end.”

After that, Mzi had taken his relative (wrapped in garbage bags, to keep the Spirit Horse pristine) to a nearby hospital, where the man recovered. Later, Mzi and I visited him in a large, windowless room filled with beds. He lay shirtless, his stab wounds covered in bandages, a tube pulling fluid from the wound near his left nipple. He looked small and impossibly young. He wore an oxygen mask and was asking the doctor if he could have something to eat or drink. The doctor, a bespectacled white man in his early thirties, bent over a tray table piled high with bloody gauze. He was from Ohio, it turned out, fresh out of med school and on a one-month volunteer stint in the Cape Town ghettos before he began his job at a hospital in Delaware. He was telling the young man to breathe, even though it was painful, and that he could eat after his X-ray.

“So is it very violent here?” I asked.

“Very,” he said, smiling pleasantly but, I sensed, only moments away from bursting into tears. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen multiple stab wounds like this.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two days.”

Once Mzi had finished cleaning the Spirit Horse, we went inside and I plopped down on his mother’s couch. His eight-year-old niece was chasing her toddler cousin through the room. The niece placed the baby on my lap and the baby began to scream.

“How will I ever get access to the prisons?” I wondered. “How will I ever get to Terry?” Terry, the adolescent thief from Gugulethu arrested and released in 1993, was now thirty-five years old and bunking in Pollsmoor on shoplifting charges.

“I believe I have a solution,” Mzi said, pacing. “We can hit two birds using one stone.”

Eight men had been arrested for Amy’s murder. Easy, Ntobeko, Vusumzi, and Mongezi went to prison. The APLA trio was freed for lack of evidence. Terry the teenage thief was freed on account of his age. I had talked to Easy, Ntobeko, and Mongezi. I had also spoken to Mzi’s brother Steyn, the only surviving member of the APLA trio (the two other men had died years earlier, one in a shootout with cops as he tried to rob the Shoprite and one from substance abuse and illness). Vusumzi lived in another township, and nobody knew what had become of him. That left Terry.

All we had to do was figure out visiting hours, Mzi posited, and we’d be able to slip in. We could see Pollsmoor and interview Terry at the same time. As Mzi and all of his neighbors and anyone with half a brain well knew, and as I was learning, the almost purposeful impossibility of South African bureaucratic processes led any sane person to simply ignore them. Clever circumvention was the name of the game.

Mzi and I drove straight to the prison that afternoon, through a series of run-down colored neighborhoods full of Cash ’n Carry shops and fish stands and homeless people, and then into upscale Tokai. A black African uniformed guard, with a heavy accent unique to that of the colored population, stood at the entrance turning people away. As Mzi and I edged closer, we noticed a pattern: this guard’s attitude shifted in relation to the people with whom he interacted. He was abrupt and rude to black people; his answer to their questions was an exasperated “Read. The. Sign.” But when speaking with a colored person, he was polite. Mzi walked up first and asked if we could visit. Having no experience visiting a prisoner, I’d supposed we could just waltz in.

“Not today,” the guard growled, looking past Mzi. His eyes floated and landed on me, the only white person in line. “What are you needing, lady?” he asked courteously.

“I’m with him,” I said, motioning to Mzi.

The guard’s face fell. He ran his gaze up and down Mzi. “I have a right to know the information I’m requesting,” Mzi said. “I would like to know the hours of visitation.”

“That’s fine,” the guard said, addressing me again, spouting off the days for male prisoners and for female prisoners.

“I would also like to check the status of an inmate,” Mzi continued, staring at the guard, who refused to make eye contact.

“You can go inside and ask,” the guard said, again answering to me.

Once Mzi had gone on, the guard turned to me and asked what I was doing at Pollsmoor. How did I know that guy? Where was I from? Was I married? To a South African? To a black?

After Mzi gathered the proper information about visiting hours and inmate details, we walked away.

“That guy’s grandfather changed his identity and now he doesn’t know who he is,” Mzi observed, referring to the fact that the guard spoke like a colored person despite looking like an ethnic Xhosa.

The history of South African people was all mixed up with the concept of passing and the fluidity of race. Under apartheid, black people had tried to pass as coloreds for better benefits, and colored people had tried to pass for white. Several books and movies detailed the life of one woman who, though the descendant of three generations of white Afrikaners, was classified as colored (some decades-old black gene, it was theorized, had surfaced in her, making her appear mixed-race) and thrust into a bizarro world in which she was rejected by white society, ended up marrying a black man, and became estranged from her parents.

Post-apartheid, many folks were trying to change back to their original designations, under the impression that with the new ANC government, it was more beneficial to be black. But people were also still attached to the myth of intrinsic white value. It made matters confusing from the outside—and surely much more confusing from within.

“He hates black people because he hates his real identity as an African,” Mzi said of the guard.

In the parking lot, Mzi and I came upon an octogenarian Xhosa woman standing in the sun with an infant swaddled on her back and a garbage bag in her hands. Mzi offered her a lift to the nearest bus station. On the way, she explained that her grandson was in prison for robbing a lady with a toy gun. Then she got off in a nearby suburb and lined up for a minivan taxi to take her the hour back to Khayelitsha, after which she’d have to walk a mile to her shack, the baby sleeping on her hunched spine.

We continued into town. As we waited at a red light, a minivan taxi in the middle lane stopped and opened its doors. A hefty black woman climbed out and began to make her way to the median. Just then, the light changed to green, and a small hatchback bounded forward just as the woman, oblivious, stepped before it. The car swiftly hit her and just as swiftly braked. The woman slammed to the ground. As she scrambled back up, it seemed to me, frozen in my car, that her sheer bulk had acted as a sort of personal airbag. I stopped for a moment, to make sure that the car that hit her would also be stopping, but as I distractedly gazed over, a man behind me began to lean on the horn.

I looked back at him, in his shiny late-model SUV: white man, bald head, a pair of Ray-Bans shielding his eyes. He wore a polo shirt. He leaned harder. The woman who had been hit was speaking with the people who had hit her. He leaned again. Just then, some craggy part of me broke in two and a gallon of rage bubbled up.

“Fuck you!” I hollered, suddenly and to my own surprise.

The man in the SUV exclaimed something, as far as I could see in the rearview mirror, and then he swerved in front of me.

“Get out of the car!” he yelled. “Get out of the car!”

“You get out!” I screamed back, now leaning out the window.

Road rage was common in South Africa. In Cape Town, a thirty-five-year-old athlete had used his hockey stick and fists to beat a fifty-five-year-old tailgater to death. In Johannesburg, an armed motorcyclist shot an armed driver, who, wounded, returned fire, killing the motorcyclist. In the Eastern Cape, Nelson Mandela’s scandal-plagued grandson, Mandla Mandela, was charged with pulling a gun on, and then brutally assaulting, a teacher who had crashed into his friend’s car. The man underwent surgery for a blood clot on his brain.

This was all probably because South Africans were outraged—about race relations, corruption, ineptitude, money, class, status, politics. Beneath a thin veneer of good manners, the whole society was teeming with tension and entitlement, where people packed pistols and where everyone was perceived as either a potential perpetrator or a potential victim. Perhaps for these reasons, and because the cops rarely enforced traffic laws and happily took bribes, South Africans were notoriously aggressive, reckless drivers.