Lindi gathered her work things, looked out of the window, decided she would not need her waterproofs, and manoeuvred her bike through the front door of her ground-floor flat.
4
Lindi arrived at South Trust’s King’s Cross offices, a converted Victorian warehouse now hosting architects, tech start-ups and a firm of human-rights lawyers. No sign of Anton Chetty. On this day, of all days, you’d have thought he’d manage to get into the office on time. She knew where to find him, but she also knew that to search him out would be more trouble than it was worth, a cue for one of his now familiar rants about not needing a nanny.
True to form, Anton was in his usual spot at the café down the road. He always claimed his best work was done there, in the coffee house, at the table in the front corner by the full-length window.
Now living in London, Anton still took more than a passing interest in South Africa. He’d been born there, grown up there, and had even been jailed there. For him, the personal had always overlapped with the professional. He was the charismatic, if shambolic, director of South Trust, which was generally regarded as the most effective outfit involved in conflict resolution outside the United Nations. Most of its work was in poor countries, almost all of which were in the southern hemisphere. ‘Local solutions for local problems’ – that was its tag line. Independently funded and staffed by men and women whose hands-on, real-time decision-making was the antithesis of the committee-ridden structures of conventional diplomacy, South Trust had negotiated deals in places where others feared to tread. It had no official or statutory powers but plenty of influence.
Anton had been up half the night – at least, that was what it felt like. Once he’d heard the news about Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder, he’d been on the phone to old contacts in South Africa. None of them had any answers to his enquiries about Lesedi’s murder and, like Lindi, warned him against rushing to conclusions by linking the killing to land sales. But Anton had eventually slumped into a fitful sleep, convinced he was onto something. When a journalist called first thing in the morning, he found himself giving voice to his suspicions. It was the clip Clive Missenden had heard, prompting his early-morning call to Lindi.
Now nursing a hangover and gulping his second espresso, Anton was determined to find something, anything that might give credence to his overnight hunch. He scrolled through numerous news sites, followed threads on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. A campaigner at heart, he wanted his news unadulterated and he made sure he was plugged into what activists on the ground were saying – in this case in South Africa. He gave short shrift to the speeches given by the apparatchiks in the ruling party, the silver-tongued revolutionaries in their Canali suits, with a penchant for the finer things in life. He knew some, and if he didn’t know them personally, he knew their type. And he largely ignored the international newspapers and their websites. ‘What the hell do those parachute journalists know about anything?’ he would say to whoever would listen.
As far as Anton Chetty was concerned, from whichever quarter the editorial judgements came, they had a common refrain: ‘Here we go again,’ they implied, as if the prospect of yet another African country throwing it all away was as inevitable as the summer rains over Johannesburg. If there was one thing he despised it was the way Western journalists expected so little from Africa, and the self-satisfaction that seeped from their journalism when they thought they had been proved right in their prejudice.
In the years that he’d been in charge, Anton had steered the Trust away from getting involved in South Africa, despite his strong personal interest in his erstwhile homeland. He knew too many of the people who now ran the country and, perhaps more to the point, they knew him. He came with baggage; excess baggage, they would say. When old comrades, now ministers and advisers in government, came to London they would give Anton a wide berth. They had become masters of pragmatism, and found it irritating that he was still talking about ideals. He was rarely, if ever, invited to functions at the Trafalgar Square High Commission. The feeling, it had to be said, was mutual.
But the murder of Lesedi Motlantshe changed everything. No more squeamishness about being accused of interfering in South Africa. To Anton’s febrile mind, Lesedi’s death was not an isolated and untimely killing but the latest and most chilling act of violence among the many he’d been monitoring in Mpumalanga Province.
For some months now there’d been a number of apparently inexplicable and largely unreported attacks on farms in the province. Until now, no one had been killed and nothing was ever taken. Hardly the stuff of headlines. But time and again farm property or equipment would be damaged. On one farm the tractors’ tyres had been slashed. Somewhere else an experimental crop of mielies was hacked down. In another place an intruder had disabled the computerised timer on an irrigation system. Elsewhere a dam had been blown up.
All the incidents had been chronicled in a blog, under the name of the Land Collective. Anton couldn’t remember when he’d first come across the site, but once he had, it had become compelling reading. Every instalment drew attention to the fact that the farm in question had been sold or was about to be sold. Far from being random acts of vandalism, the incidents were brought together in a single narrative. Yet, as far as Anton could make out, the authorities chose to treat each one separately: to acknowledge a link – even behind closed doors – would be to accept that the post-apartheid consensus was breaking up and the political hegemony of the ruling party was being eroded.
Much to Anton’s private satisfaction, the Land Collective had been highlighting something that had long been on his own mind. Anton had always believed that land ownership would become an issue in South Africa, just as it had been in other countries where colonial settlers had carved up the best land and parcelled it up among themselves. Each nation had dealt with it differently. In Kenya white mischief was met with black rebellion; in the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, Soviet-backed revolutionary movements had nationalised the land at a single stroke of a Communist pen; and in Zimbabwe a desperate Robert Mugabe had let loose his thugs in a populist move to shore up his faltering hold on power. Anton wasn’t sure how it would pan out in South Africa, but he believed there would be a day of reckoning before long.
He went back to the website, picking through previous statements about various incidents on farms, hoping to find a clue as to why Lesedi had been murdered. Nothing. Not even a hint that revolutionary inflation might account for sabotage turning into assassination.
He couldn’t help feeling that these incidents in South Africa were symptoms of the unfinished business he’d talked about so often. It was the price that had to be paid for the way in which the ‘real’ struggle in South Africa – as he put it – had been tamed and repackaged so that race rather than wealth had become the defining characteristic.
That, to Anton, was apartheid’s big lie: that the great divide was all about race. The painstaking demarcation of areas between whites and others: nie-blankes, vir debruik deur blankes. The classification of people according to skin colour: natives, Indians, Coloureds, whites. Anton was dark-skinned, darker than many so-called blacks, a genetic trace of the Tamil blood that ran strong in his veins but which he barely acknowledged. One of the lasting legacies of the apartheid system was the way in which its brutally simple racial categories superseded more subtle cultural and ethnic differences. So, in the old days, when he was growing up in Durban on South Africa’s east coast, he was simply ‘Indian’. Whether he was Tamil or not was irrelevant. The point was to distinguish whites from non-whites, nothing more.
For Anton, replacing white leaders with black was merely a stepping stone to the real prize – the communal ownership of wealth-making. There were rare, unguarded moments, usually on a bellyful of whisky, when he would tell his colleagues: ‘Whether you are being fucked by a black bastard or a white bastard is irrelevant – you are still being fucked!’ In his book, a black capitalist was