It was the same whether he was talking to the politics department at some university in Sweden or to genteel activists in a cathedral city in middle England. In their polite, ever-so-respectful way his hosts in the anti-apartheid movement would suggest, never demand, that he talk about his experiences in prison or how, as a child, a Catholic priest had instilled a sense of social justice in him. At the time, the thing that annoyed him even more than their liking for these insipid tales of victimhood was the way they were always so terribly reasonable. Why couldn’t they just confront him, actually look him in the eye and say: ‘Shut the fuck up about the revolution. You’re here to make people feel good about themselves, not make them feel guilty for being part of the system you hate so much!’
He dragged his eyes away from the rain-spotted window, wondering how long he’d been lost in reverie. He found a recent and detailed account from the Land Collective about a strike by workers at an orange farm in Mpumalanga Province. It described how the trouble had flared up after a whole crop had had to be discarded because the pesticide had been contaminated with petrol. The farm owner, one Piet Meyer, had immediately blamed the workers and sacked the elderly foreman. The old man’s protests – that he had had nothing to do with what had happened – had fallen on deaf ears. Meyer’s attitude – as reflexive as swatting one of the ticks that would land on his leathery, sun-freckled skin – was a throwback to the old era. Anton read the first paragraph:
SACK FIRST and ask questions later – NOTHING has changed. So now the union bosses have been called in. What a joke. They are part of the SYSTEM. They will take six months to write a report and then they will negotiate in a FIVE-STAR hotel and the PEOPLE will be FORGOTTEN. The only thing the farmer is interested in is the FAT PROFIT he is going to make when he SELLS THE LAND. Yes, he wants to SELL his farm to whoever will give him most money. FOREIGNERS want the land but Meyer does not care – he just wants MILLIONS of rands. Nobody asks what will happen to the WORKERS. What are YOU going to do about this? Are you going to leave this INJUSTICE to stand?
It was only ten thirty in the morning and Anton already felt tired and exasperated. He peeled off his rimless glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose, and tugged at his goatee. He heard the hiss of the espresso machine and looked over to the counter where Saleh, the Turkish café owner, was taking a breather before preparing for the midday rush.
‘Get me another double-shot coffee, man,’ he shouted.
‘You look like shit,’ came the reply. ‘Whatever you were up to, I hope it was fun. You should eat something. Let me fix you a couple of eggs.’
Anton felt his stomach churn. ‘Listen, I don’t need a fucking mother, I need a coffee.’
A couple of minutes later Saleh arrived with the coffee and placed a large tumbler of fresh orange juice next to it. They smiled at each other. Anton looked at the juice the way he used to look at cough medicine when he was a kid and downed it in one long gulp. Then he turned to the screen again.
He found nothing in the international press about the incident at the orange farm. In his experience rural affairs only twitched the interest of foreign correspondents if the fortunes of white farmers were at stake. They rarely, if ever, departed from this central theme. The plight of an ageing black foreman didn’t register on the Richter scale of news judgements. So when it came to land and how it was distributed there was always the story of the lone white farmer to fall back on – the one who heroically stands up to thugs but, in the end, abandons the fight and joins the growing numbers heading for the departure gate and a life of bilious exile overseas.
There had been plenty of crime on South Africa’s vast commercial farms in the years since democracy. The farmers who owned them, still almost exclusively white, had had the misfortune to be both isolated and relatively rich, certainly in comparison to the poverty all around them. They were sitting ducks. Hundreds had been killed. The murders were the collateral of botched robberies by gangs of increasingly frustrated youths for whom the great promise of freedom had been as beguiling as a strip-tease but, ultimately, just as unsatisfying.
There was a mention on the website of a provincial farming magazine in South Africa. In this version, the incident at Meyer’s farm had been reduced to nothing more than an advice column on the need to supervise farm labourers. There was an interview with a representative from De Kok and Sons, suppliers of farming equipment, fertilisers and pesticides. The spokeswoman said the company had decided – in the light of events at the Meyer farm – to have another look at the instructions that went with their products. They were thinking of making them simpler, perhaps using cartoon characters and pictures to illustrate what needed to be done.
‘We know some of the employees find it difficult to read,’ she was quoted as saying.
He still had the Land Collective website open and clicked back to it. What a contrast! There were the names of the foreman and some of the farm labourers. It even named the brand of pesticide and how the petrol might have been mixed with it. It was like an online training session on how to replicate the sabotage.
News of the event at the Meyer farm would have spread from farmstead to farmstead quicker than a dose of foot and mouth. And yet the magazine had chosen not to report any of the detail. Anton Chetty thought he had the answer. They were frightened of contagion – not of the agrarian kind but the political variety.
It was enough to get his blood up. God! This was like the old days. A cause to get stuck into. He flipped the cover back over his tablet, chucked it into his rucksack and headed for the door.
‘Hey! I’m running a business here – what about some money?’ shouted Saleh.
Too late. Anton was already out of the door. He darted across York Way, all traces of the hangover now miraculously gone.
He plunged into his office building, which overlooked the Eurostar railway line to Paris.
Wayne, whose job description as the building’s janitor was entirely at odds with his preferred occupation of reading the Sun newspaper while slumped on his seat, barely looked up when Anton shouted, as he did every day, ‘Stop reading that fucking rag,’ while bounding up the stairs – the closest he ever got to a daily exercise routine.
‘Nice of you to make an appearance, Mr Chetty,’ Lindi called, as he rushed past her desk.
‘Stop being an old bag and come into my office. And bring me some bloody coffee.’
He peeled off several layers of clothing. More than two decades abroad, first in Stockholm and latterly in London, had failed to make a dent in his sartorial tastes. He still wore a selection of safari suits – the only allowance he made for the inclement weather was to wear a woolly jumper under the jacket. It made him look bulkier than he was – comically so, given his spindly legs. He was short, no more than five foot six or seven but, unlike many men of his stature, he was entirely relaxed about it. ‘Sit down, you bugger. My head is going to fall off if I have to look up at you any longer,’ was a refrain directed at ministers and minions alike.
He hunted for the TV remote control, looking under last week’s newspapers, on the floor beside the sofa until, eventually, he found it perched on the edge of the bookshelf. He pressed the power button and heard the little click before the flat screen on the wall burst into life. For a moment, he imagined it was a detonator setting off a bomb. Yet more fantasies from the glory days. His ‘cell’ in Durban, a group of college friends, really, had had rudimentary training in bomb-making, taking instruction from a pamphlet smuggled to them by the ANC’s military wing. He remembered going through the step-by-step instructions, using rice packed in women’s tights as a