The Burning Land. George Alagiah. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: George Alagiah
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781786897954
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started within minutes of the police statement: a Mozambican labourer in Mpumalanga Province had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe. Across the country there were reports of attacks on foreigners. It didn’t matter where they came from: an exotic accent was enough. In barely forty-eight hours, parts of South Africa began to look like a war zone.

      ‘Let them cook,’ the man shouted, as the fire-fighters tried to muscle their way through the crowd that had gathered around the western entrance to Ponte City. Above the screaming heads, a window on the fifth floor of the building belched thick black smoke. Occasionally the wind would clear it, revealing the hungry flames probing for new material to devour. From several other windows, occupants of the building leaned out, pleading for help. But their fear-filled cries were drowned in the noise below, the wailing police sirens, the deep-throated mechanical murmur of the fire-engine pumps and, above it all, the taunts of the crowd flinging their filthy curses like bloodthirsty spectators waiting for the kill in a gladiatorial contest.

      ‘We don’t want foreign rats in South Africa!’ a woman shouted.

      Immediately, as if on cue, those around her took up the chant: ‘The rats must go! The rats must be killed!’

      Much higher, from the crown of Ponte City, there was a curling, twisting stream of smoke. On the ground, a section of the crowd suddenly surged in one direction, no one really knowing what they were looking for but all of them scenting spilled blood. The police had cleared a space around a twisted body on the pavement.

      ‘Fucking Mozambican was trying to run,’ someone said, as if that was explanation enough as to why the man lay lifeless where he’d fallen.

      ‘The place is full of them,’ another said, adding, ‘You can smell them.’

      The fifty-four-storey doughnut-shaped Ponte City, which dominated the Johannesburg skyline, had once been one of the most desirable places to live. Built in the mid-seventies, the tallest residential building on the continent, it stood tall and proud, like a middle-fingered rebuke to those who hoped apartheid’s foundations were crumbling. But for all its architectural precociousness, the Ponte was left isolated in the eighties as the Group Areas Act, which strictly assigned different parts of the city to different races, began to lose its force and the complexion of downtown Johannesburg began to change.

      The adventurous white city-dwellers, who had revelled in their fast-lane lives, found a new enthusiasm for the mundane charms of the suburbs. As the white tide retreated, it was replaced by a swirling torrent of black people, many of them from outside the country’s border. Africa, in all its spectacular colour and chaos, lashed the Ponte building, like a wave crashing into a cliff. It didn’t stand a chance.

      By the mid-nineties the Ponte echoed to the sound of a dozen languages, a Babel-esque din which foretold the worst fears of white South Africans, who worried that they would be left marooned in their final redoubt, unable to understand the world around them and misunderstood by it. With white flight went the businesses and their taxes; with the taxes went many of the public services that had once made Ponte the gold standard of urban living.

      Ponte’s new immigrant colony, from Nigerian traders and Congolese pastors to Mozambican labourers and Somali shopkeepers, lived in the Catch-22 of the black economy, where they were in the city but not of it. If they tried to pay their bills, their dubious immigration status would be exposed. If they tried to sort out their residence permits they would be thrown out. So the plaster peeled off the walls, and the plumbing sprang leaks and the rubbish piled up. The building itself, with its great cylindrical cavern, became a dumping ground, the detritus rising in layers, like geological accretions, until it stood several storeys high.

      More recent attempts to rehabilitate the building had met with varying degrees of success. Flats in the uppermost floors were renovated and a few adventurous types had moved in, like an expedition force sent into the unknown. But for the most part, Ponte City remained what it had been for twenty-odd years – a home from home for those for whom the African dream was still just that: a work in progress.

      Now even that meagre hope was threatened, engulfed in the indiscriminate flames of xenophobia.

      6

      Outside Nelspruit, in Mpumalanga Province, the few people left in the squatter camp, the ‘informal settlement’, as the bureaucrats call it, stare at the man. He’s an outsider. That much is obvious: his clothes are too clean; they fit him like he actually bought them, not like the rags they are standing in. They only have to look at him to know he’s a South African, not like them, migrants. They are the marginal people, the cleaners and labourers, the servants and night-shift workers who creep around the shadowlands of every nation on earth.

      What does he want? He greets them, or tries to. They just turn away, suspicious. He wants to ask them how it happened, this devastation. Did they recognise anyone, perhaps those who led the thugs? Did the police come? No answers. Just the silent accusation that whoever he is, whatever he wants, it is too late. He wants to tell them it was not his fault.

      Shack after shack, reduced to a pile of smoking embers and buckled corrugated-metal sheeting. Here and there he sees the remnants of the small, meagre lives of these people, so essential to the rural economy but unrecognised by it: a stack of enamel bowls ready for an evening meal that was never eaten; a cracked mirror in which someone, against all the odds, had tried to show a presentable face to a world that couldn’t have cared less; a portrait of the late Samora Machel, Mozambique’s charismatic revolutionary leader, still pinned to the plywood partition that lies on the ground. He knows about Samora Machel, his struggle against Portuguese colonialism in the sixties and the subsequent, even more vicious, battle with the apartheid regime in South Africa, which had been grafted onto the history syllabus when he was in secondary school.

      Staring at the faded poster of the smiling leader in his heyday, he’s weighed down by a profound and almost debilitating sense of disappointment. Machel’s victory, winning back the right of an African people to call the land their own, seems so empty now. South Africa should have been next. But here he was, still caught in a fight over land. There was a betrayal at the heart of this latest struggle in South Africa that eclipsed anything its Portuguese colonisers had done in Mozambique. When the Portuguese took the land, when they exploited its natural largesse, they had done so as conquerors: they hadn’t pretended otherwise. The whole point of the exercise was to enrich people many thousands of miles away, not those whose sweat seeped into the ground as they toiled under an African sun. But in this new battle in South Africa, it was men who had won the land in the name of freedom who were enriching themselves at the expense of those who’d been so naive as to think the great struggle had been about them.

      Now he’s back in town. He sits at a table, alone and in the dark. A single light bulb hangs uselessly in the centre of the room and the curtains are drawn tight. His mahogany skin is rendered pallid and gaunt by the blue wash of a computer screen. His tired eyes stare through spectacles that mirror the screen. Long, elegant fingers, normally so deft and expressive, lie beside the keyboard, motionless. He wants to write but can’t think where to start. The thoughts are there; the words are elusive. He, too, has seen the video that Lindi and Anton witnessed.

      It was never meant to be like this. Sabotage, yes. Propaganda, yes. All of that and more – but not this. Not murder. This hideous mob violence was never part of the plan. In Johannesburg, the iconic Ponte City is on fire; here in Mpumalanga Province the homes of Mozambican migrant workers have been ransacked; and even in far away Western Cape a sixteen-year-old Somali girl is gang-raped and left bleeding by a drainage canal on the edge of the Khayelitsha squatter camp. Where did all this anger come from?

      In his mind, he turns over every word he’s ever written since they – the Land Collective – started their clandestine campaign against land sales. Which phrase, which sentence, which exhortation could anyone have construed as licence to murder? He realises he’d never really thought about who was reading his statements or understood how they might be transmuted in the reading. He deals in ideals; it had never occurred to him that others might trade in vengeance. He imagines how, like a game of digital Chinese whispers, his