He keys in a series of passwords, following an encrypted path till he reaches his destination. His last entry is there. It was written late on the day of Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder. He rereads it.
Lesedi Motlantshe was a SON OF AFRICA, a child raised on the milk of freedom. He did not deserve to die. Our campaign is to PROTECT THE LAND, NOT KILL ITS PEOPLE. It was not Lesedi who wanted to sell the land to FOREIGNERS. It is the SYSTEM. The deals are being signed by big men sitting in Johannesburg, London, Dubai – not here in our BELOVED MPUMALANGA. Lesedi was born rich but that is not a crime. His life was the life many of our people have dreamed of. Whoever has killed him has not advanced our cause. This HEINOUS ACT will alienate us from many people who looked at Lesedi like their own child. WE ARE NOT THUGS, we are not tsotsis, we are ACTIVISTS. Those who have done this thing must go to the police. We must not let our cause be derailed. We must not let the blood of this innocent man stain our HISTORIC MISSION.
It’s a little after two in the morning. In a few hours’ time he would have to set off for work. To his other life.
He isn’t sure if he’d fallen asleep. His laptop is in screensaver mode, a logo bouncing off the edges, like some infinite game of snooker. Could he, could they, the Land Collective, change the direction of this violence? He looks around the room. A hint of dawn light is just discernible through the curtains. He taps the keyboard and is back where he was, a blank screen waiting for the words that might reach those who have unleashed this wave of chaos.
His boots, discarded by the doorway to the room, are still covered with ash from the squatter camp. He starts to type.
I have just returned from HILL VIEW. My boots are covered in ash, my clothes are smelling of smoke from the fires that have left thousands of our FELLOW AFRICANS homeless tonight. Our BROTHERS and SISTERS from Mozambique have paid a high price for this FOOLISHNESS. This chaos is just what the LANDOWNERS AND THEIR MINISTER FRIENDS want. They want us to fight among ourselves. They want us to believe that the problem is the Mozambicans. But they are POORER than we are. They are the POOREST OF THE POOR. That is why they come here, working for NOTHING. They are POWERLESS. They are our comrades in this NEW STRUGGLE for our land. The police ARRESTED A MOZAMBICAN BROTHER but they had NO PROOF that he was involved in the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe. They want people to think this is a struggle between South Africans and Mozambicans. But it is not. This is a struggle between those who WORK THE LAND and those who want to sell it to POLITICIANS AND THEIR RICH FRIENDS OVERSEAS. It is OUR LAND, it belongs to ALL South Africans. This violence must STOP NOW.
7
The photograph, in its simple black frame, had hung on the wall outside her parents’ study for as long as Lindi Seaton could remember. She must have walked past it a million times. In the mornings, the sun glinted off the glass, obscuring the picture and reflecting a shard of light across the narrow hallway. It was only in the afternoon, as the sun moved over the house, that you could actually see the figures in the photograph – they emerged from the glare one by one, a slow and gentle revelation of their collective history, a curtain parting before a new act in a play.
This wasn’t just another of the many family portraits that jostled for attention: it was a picture that said something about the Seatons. It took pride of place among all the other framed photographs that had been bumped and knocked so often that the wall looked like a particularly careless example of crazy paving. This one photograph – taken in South Africa in the mid-eighties – was a kind of visual shorthand. It said, ‘This is who we are.’
On the left of the photo was Harry Seaton, his hair thick, curly and dark. He had one arm around a plump black woman – her apron spoke of her status in the household, but Harry’s protective arm evoked her special place in the family’s affection. On the other side of the woman was Helen Seaton, her head tilted towards the black woman in another, understated, sign of closeness. In front of them stood three children – two white, one black. Lindi was there, slightly to one side and looking across at her older brother, Ralph. He had his arm around a boy who, in turn, held Ralph’s waist. Harry, Maude, Helen, Lindi, Ralph and Kagiso, Maude’s only son. A portrait of togetherness in a divided nation.
Many years and thousands of miles away, that photograph of the Seatons and their house-worker, Maude, would grow in significance. It would come to occupy an almost totemic position in their recollection of a time when their credentials as opponents of apartheid were understood and taken for granted. After all, hadn’t Harry written the leader columns that had so irritated the apartheid government? And there was Helen’s voluntary work at the Legal Resource Centre that saw a stream of black petitioners queue up every day, clutching bits of paper that could change their lives. So how natural and effortless it was that Maude should be treated as one of the family.
But that was then; this was now. You couldn’t relive all that in a North London terrace.
Slowly, and unwittingly, they were drawn into an allegiance to their new life in London. In this they were led by Lindi and Ralph. Helen and Harry were the parents of the new kids in the local school. As the children made friends so Helen and Harry found they were pulled into a new social circle – a group of people brought together not by choice or conviction but by the arbitrary drawing of a line on a street map: they were all in the same school catchment area.
For the Seatons, who they had once been became less important than who they were now. The other mothers at the school had been quick to notice how confidently Helen wore her collection of bold ethnic jewellery and asked her where she’d got it – but that was the limit of their curiosity. There were no Brownie points for having once tried to chip away at the edifice of apartheid. It was Helen who felt this need for a separation from their former life most keenly. Once or twice, over a hurried cappuccino at Ribbons & Taylor on Stoke Newington Church Street, she’d noticed how a reference to her campaigning days in South Africa had been ignored, like a conversational cul-de-sac. The heartfelt conviction that had propelled her actions in Johannesburg didn’t translate well in the tired aftermath of a hectic school run. Here, in the frazzled mess of soggy anoraks and young children, her past accomplishments seemed neither relevant nor interesting.
And that was where the photograph came into its own. Hanging in the hallway that linked the study to the rest of the house, it made its point unceremoniously. For all the apparent nonchalance with which it had been placed on the wall, the photograph had a quiet eloquence. It said: here was a family that was comfortable with race, even if in the country outside the opposite was the case.
Now, as Lindi’s eyes scoured the photograph, she mused that it was accurate in every detail, but the image as a whole managed to convey an impression that Lindi no longer felt was honest. It was greater than the sum of its parts. She had come to think of that photo like one of those mirrors in department-store fitting rooms that make even the most generously proportioned customers look good in an unwise choice. The mirror doesn’t lie: it just plays around with the truth.
As she grew up and began to make up her own mind about what was happening in South Africa, Lindi couldn’t stop herself thinking that her parents had taken the easy option. She knew there were South African-born teenagers like her in London, whose parents really were a part of ‘the struggle’. She remembered the memorial service for the father of one of her friends. Afterwards the congregation had taken over the upstairs room in a pub. There had been plenty of talk about what he’d been like, how he’d always been the guy who would go the extra mile. Nobody said how he’d actually died, except that he’d been on a mission in one of the camps run by the African National Congress, in those days spearheading the liberation movement. It was always that way with the real activists. It had seemed to her that the less you knew about them, the more important their role in ‘the movement’. Not like her parents and their friends, who were constantly talking about the struggle as if it were a club anyone could join.
And there was the whole business of her name. Lindi was the diminutive of Lindiwe, ‘the awaited one’. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being called Lindi (though she got bored with explaining its meaning)