‘What’s going on?’ he barked. ‘Why is this girl talking about bad men at the school?’
‘Is that what she said?’ Priscilla Motlantshe sounded amused, which only added to her husband’s irritation. ‘No, today was meant to be a visit to Newtown. They were going to Museum Africa, but it’s been cancelled because of the protest.’
‘What protest?’
‘You know! These land people. You were talking to Mkobi about it yesterday! Have you forgotten already?’
He knew why he had a mistress. His wife could make everything sound like an accusation. He had, indeed, called the president’s office the day before in a last-ditch attempt to have the march stopped or postponed on some legal technicality – at least until after this meeting in Dubai. That reminded him: he needed to get that little shit Mkobi sacked. How the prissy bastard had made it into the president’s office he didn’t know. Mkobi hadn’t put his call through. ‘The president is a bit tied up just now,’ he’d said, as if he were addressing some junior minister. Motlantshe could have called the president on his direct line, or on his private mobile phone, but that wasn’t the point. Who the hell was Mkobi to decide whether or not he could speak to the president?
His temper had not been improved by the fact that Mkobi, the presidential chief of staff, had been right: it was too late to do anything about the march, but Motlantshe liked to reach these conclusions for himself and not have some jumped-up bureaucrat treat him like he was a novice. After all, he’d done time in jail for ungrateful bastards like Mkobi. Besides, judging by that voice of his, he was probably one of those homos or something.
‘No, I remember, I’m just tired after the flight.’
‘Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’
There it was again: the accusatory tone. The needling suggestion that the reason he was tired was because he had failed to sleep, that it was his fault. Had it been the other woman, she would have whispered sweet nothings into his ear and told him she would wipe away all his tiredness just as soon as he was back in her arms.
‘Okay, I have to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll call after I meet these fellows from London.’
‘And don’t forget it’s Lesedi’s birthday this week,’ she threw in, for good measure. Lesedi was their only son, born in the days of struggle.
‘Of course I remember,’ he snapped back.
‘By the way, Jo, that minister, the Coloured fellow …’ Priscilla continued to use the old apartheid lexicon for ‘mixed race’.
‘You mean Jake, Jake Willemse?’
‘That’s him, yes. He called here.’
‘What’s he doing calling you?’
‘He said he couldn’t get hold of you. He was angry. He wants to know what Lesedi is doing in Mpumalanga. He says Lesedi is interfering. He says if you can’t stop him, he’ll deal with Lesedi himself.’
‘Who told Lesedi to go to Mpumalanga? What’s the boy doing over there?’
‘He says he wants to see things for himself, talk to local people to find out why they are so upset by this land thing. And, Jo, you have to stop calling him a boy. He’s a man now.’
‘Why should he be talking to these stupid people? They are being led by extremists. If he wants to be treated like a man, he needs to start thinking like one instead of all this foolishness he talks about.’
‘I can remember when you used to talk like that.’
There was wistfulness in her voice, which Motlantshe both recognised and loathed. He knew that everything else that was wrong in their marriage had grown out of this one central accusation – that he had forgotten where they had both started out.
They had met in the seventies. Josiah Motlantshe was the most prominent in a new generation of activists that was emerging inside South Africa, carrying the mantle of leadership while the likes of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo were either jailed or in exile. He was an extrovert, a fiery orator. Priscilla was the opposite, but what she lacked in public presence she more than made up for with a quiet determination. When Motlantshe and some others were jailed it was said that, of all the women who were left behind, Priscilla would cope best.
And so she did, raising the son who barely knew his father. Lesedi Motlantshe was brought up on heroic tales of what his father was like and what he would do, come freedom day. But when he had emerged from Robben Island, it had turned out that Motlantshe was a far better businessman than politician, and he believed Priscilla had never forgiven him for that. Instead, she had brainwashed the boy, tried to turn him into a version of the man she wanted her husband to be. At least, that was how he’d put it in the days when he could be bothered to argue with her.
‘I haven’t got time for that nonsense,’ he shot back. ‘If he wants to be treated like a man he should be here, by my side, talking to these London people.’
‘But you know he doesn’t like what you are doing. He thinks the land should be going to our people.’
‘It is you who has put this rubbish in his head. The land is not going anywhere. It is staying in South Africa. It is going to make money for the people of South Africa.’
‘You mean make money for you.’
‘Just call him and tell him to get back to Jo’burg.’ Motlantshe flung the phone onto the bed. He could still hear his wife’s disembodied voice. He stared at the phone, waiting for her to shut up.
Motlantshe looked up at the TV screen and realised he was seeing downtown Johannesburg. He put the sound up. It was the last thing he needed. There they were, hundreds of men and women doing the toyi-toyi, the rolling protest dance so reminiscent of the heyday of the anti-apartheid era. Except this was today, and Motlantshe was about to sit down with the latest land-hungry investors to tell them South Africa was a safe and stable place to park their millions. He thought about calling the executive director of the SABC but decided it was too early. Since their days as activists he’d known the man didn’t get going till mid-morning.
He’d have to send an email, which Motlantshe loathed, not least because it required a modicum of digital dexterity that was beyond his pudgy fingers. He preferred issuing his instructions over the phone, and when he had to send an email he usually got his personal assistant to key in the message. Facing the prospect of doing it himself only added to his ill-temper.
He navigated his way to the email screen on his phone, something of an achievement in itself, and started to assemble the words. He found it impossible unless he mouthed the letters aloud. He pushed down on the letter a only to see s appear on the screen. He did it again, this time producing @. The more frustrated he got the harder he pressed, making it even more likely that his thumb tip would hit the wrong letter. Eventually, he had what he wanted:
Am in Dubai to see these buyers from London. Worried protest going to upset them. This one is a big deal. The one in Mpumalanga. Keep protest coverage down. Call me. JM.
Motlantshe understood the TV business inside out – after all, he owned a channel – and knew how much other broadcasters depended on footage from SABC. Most – with the exception of BBC World and Al Jazeera – had long since shut down their bureaux in South Africa.
He had a few hours before the meeting with the London delegation. Motlantshe looked at his personalised Richard Mille watch and decided he still had time to make the other call before he was due to meet George Kariakis, the middleman who was organising the meeting. It was going to be a long day and he needed the kind of fillip that only his mistress could provide.
That same morning, some four thousand miles to the south, Kagiso Rapabane had glanced around a single open-plan room, the head office of Soil of Africa in Malelane, an unremarkable town in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province. Tourists passed through it on their way to the great Kruger National Park, but it was an experience they rarely,