The Bang-Bang Club (13 page)

The social alienation of the hostel-dwellers had been exacerbated by their exclusion from most political activities planned and initiated by township residents. The sporadic strikes, stay-aways and boycotts called to force political change or protest against living conditions were almost
always organized without consulting the migrants, who were not seen as a permanent or integral part of the community. The hostel-dwellers were thus often caught unawares by civic action, which they neither understood nor supported. For them, a strike or a stay-away simply lost them money by keeping them from work - their sole reason for being in the townships. They had no real stake in the community. The police and government were swift to take advantage of the anti-comrade sentiment among the hostel Zulus, and they encouraged and supported the rift between them and the wider community.

The sometimes heroic but always martial history of the Zulus had inculcated in them a feeling of superiority to other tribes. It was a chauvinism born in the bloody forging of the Zulu nation in the early 1800s from the various clans and chiefdoms that shared the northern Nguni language in the fertile lands east of the great escarpment, in the area now called KwaZulu-Natal. As Tarzan put it: ‘The Zulus were always the top people in the hostels, because to fight is in their blood. Their father’s father’s forefathers were fighting, clan fights. It never stops. Never, never.’

I had known the Rapoos for two years before I heard what they had suffered in the kitchen in which I had first met them. Tarzan and I were under the dashboard of my car, fitting a car radio he had given me. While fiddling with wires, he told me how his father had survived an attempt by hostel Zulus to burn him alive. ‘I woke up and this guy is standing right here with a gun and holding me. He tells me, “If you move, I will blow you,” then they took us into the kitchen and I saw the old man, Boytjie. He was wearing his pyjamas. They poured petrol over him. They tried to burn him, but match after match would not light.’

Tarzan did not tell me any more, but it had clearly been a miraculous escape for the old man. What he did not tell me was that his younger brother, Stanley, had been killed that same night. It would be years before Maki, Tarzan’s wife, would tell me the full story of that winter night in 1986.

Maki Rapoo is a large woman, stout, with a big laugh that comes
suddenly, often bringing tears to the corners of her dark brown eyes. She was born in Meadowlands in 1956 and went to the same neighbourhood schools as Tarzan. She was a shy girl and Tarzan was a confident boy who used to protect her from schoolyard bullies. But it was only after they had finished school and she went away to study nursing that they began to exchange letters and discuss marriage. By the time I knew them, they had three children. ‘In 1986, Stanley and his comrade friends used to wait at the bus station and taxi ranks to tell people to not buy groceries in town. When they found a person carrying groceries, they would destroy the goods. Flour and mielie meal were scattered on the ground. The youngsters sometimes made the person drink the cooking oil or eat the mayonnaise, things like that.’

The tenth anniversary of the brutally suppressed Soweto uprising of 16 June 1976 saw a revitalization of resistance within the country. The express goal of the ANC was to make the South African townships ungovernable. One of the tactics was to enforce a boycott of shops in the white areas. Stanley had teamed up with other young men from the hostel and was especially friendly with two of the hostel boys. The Meadowlands Hostel was unusual in that there were not just men living in it-a section housed families, displaced people whose homes on the banks of the Klip River had been washed away in floods some years previously. Stanley was 19 then, one of the self-righteous children who patrolled the townships in gangs. But then Stanley and the other township teenagers discovered that the hostel kids were not destroying the groceries, but keeping them. The hostel boys had breached the ethics of the boycott. It was right to destroy goods purchased in white shops, but to steal them was wrong. The youth considered themselves the keepers of the revolution’s morals. It was they who enforced the boycott code, while their parents struggled to make a living. The fallout between the boys was to have fatal consequences as the hostel men became involved.

On a bitterly cold night in June of 1986, the Rapoos retired early and by eight o’clock they were all in bed. But they forgot to lock the doors, something they usually did. When the group of men and boys from the
hostel tried the kitchen door, they found it open and simply walked into the house. Near midnight, Maki awoke to hear a man say in Zulu: ‘Cut the phone, they will call the police.’ Within seconds, Stanley was beside her bed and he whispered, ‘They are looking for me, tell them I am not here,’ and slipped out of the room again. The week before, Stanley had suddenly given away all his clothes, claiming that he had found a job and would buy new ones. He also gave away his bible even though it was still new. ‘Maybe he was expecting to die,’ Maki said. ‘He knew they were looking for him, but we did not realize it.’

A group of boys and men, armed with guns and machetes, were in the house. Tarzan awoke to find a revolver pressed under his chin. They threatened that if he dared move they would kill him. The intruders made the whole family gather in the kitchen. They put Tarzan and Boytjie in front of the fridge. One tall man poured petrol from a five-litre can over their heads; it ran down their faces, burning their eyes and soaking into their pyjamas. They were shivering from fright and the cold. Maki was in her nightgown with a towel wrapped around her waist.

‘We knew the boys by name, they were Stanley’s friends. One was Kalahajane and the other Mpandlane. One was a Zulu and the other from Kliptown. They started klapping (hitting) and kicking me, asking me where Stanley was. I said I did not know where he was.’

Tarzan shouted, ‘Leave my wife alone,’ but every time he moved, they pushed the gun more firmly under his chin. They kept another gun trained on Boytjie while some of them searched the house for Stanley. They went to the bedroom where Maki’s new-born baby and the other child were asleep. They turned the bed upside down, to look underneath, and the children fell to the floor and began shrieking. Maki was worried that the baby had broken a limb or been seriously hurt, but she could not go to check. The intruders could not find Stanley and they said they would take all the boys in the house and kill them one by one until he appeared. It was no idle threat, and everyone knew it. At that, Stanley climbed down through the trapdoor from the ceiling, where he had been hiding. He was wearing only an old pair of trousers
with holes at the knees and at the back, ones that he only used for gardening and painting, and a pair of sandals even though the night was cold. ‘You have found me, so let’s go,’ he said, speaking as if there was nothing to fear. He told the family that he had something to discuss with the intruders, and then he would return.

At that stage, Maki thought that they might beat him, or hand him over to the police. As they left the kitchen, the tallest of the Zulus poured the remaining petrol from the can on the floor and down the stairs. Another of the intruders took out a box of matches and lit a match, then threw it into the pool of petrol. It did not burn. Nor did the second one ignite the fuel. When he lit the third, Stanley reached over and grabbed his wrist: ‘You have already found me, what are you doing? Let’s go.’ Then two of them took Stanley by the back of the trousers, one on either side, lifting him a little. The frightened family watched them go to the gate, the older men chanting Zulu songs as Stanley’s friends and other hostel youngsters pointed out where other comrades lived. They saw one of the older men chop at the back of Stanley’s knees with a panga. He screamed as the blade cut through his tendons, rendering him unable to escape. Once they were out of the yard, Maki and Tarzan ran fearfully to the gate and watched Stanley being led down the street. He was limping. They began to follow, to see where they were taking him, but they were forced to retreat as the group shot at them. ‘Tarzan went for the police and I went to the bedroom. I knelt near the bed and opened the Bible at random. It was Psalm 144, and there I found, “What is a person? A person’s soul is like the wind,” and I knew that, definitely, they were going to kill him.’

After some time, Tarzan returned with the police. They took statements from the family, but instead of mounting a rescue into the hostel as they had hoped, the police said they should call for the van they use for collecting corpses. Suddenly one of Stanley’s friends came running into the house; he had been shot and stabbed, and was bleeding profusely, but had somehow managed to escape from the hostel and run all the way to the house. He told them that Stanley had been killed and now they were burning him. The police said they should not wait for
the morgue van, but go fetch the body before it was burnt to ashes. Maki and Tarzan were scared, as were the police, who called for back-up.

They drove cautiously into the hostel. The police had their guns drawn as they made their way along the rutted dirt road through the dormitories and to the back, near the garbage dump to the place where they knew the Zulus did their killing. There were three bodies there. The killers were sitting and looking at them, just a few metres away. They were not in the least afraid that the police might arrest them. The police ignored the armed men and Maki was afraid to look at them directly in case they decided to kill her and Tarzan too. ‘Stanley was still burning. The police used their hands to throw sand on him to put the fire out. He was bleeding. A lot. That was what stopped him burning too much.

‘I was crying and Tarzan was holding me and comforting me by saying, “As long as they did not burn him too much, we can still recognize him.”’ But by the light from the police cars’ headlamps the only way they could identify Stanley was by the ragged trousers and the beaded necklace he always wore. His eyes had been gouged out. They wrapped the body in a blanket and took him back to their home where Tarzan had to tell Boytjie how they had found Stanley.

As Maki reached the end of the story of Stanley’s death, a small man walked into the rough brick room from which the Rapoos ran a series of pay phones. His ears had small red discs with white dots fitted in the lobes, and he wore a blue-grey pinstripe suit, unfashionably cut by some village tailor. He greeted us in richly-toned Zulu. He was from the hostel. Maki answered him in Zulu, and as he entered a booth to make his call, she said, ‘Let’s wait for him to finish,’ and then she began to cry, tears flowing silently from her eyes. I handed her a pack of Kleenex and patted her hand uselessly. It was a long phone call and throughout it she could not stop crying. The little man in the suit finished and thanked Maki, paid her and left, politely pretending not to notice her tears.

‘Ever time I hear someone speak Zulu, I get scared, or anxious. I do
not know how to categorize what I feel. I did not sleep for a long time after Stanley died.’

Tarzan does not like to talk about how Stanley died - he prefers to recall how the matches miraculously never ignited the petrol. But the memory eats at him, of how he, a powerful, confident man, was helpless to save his younger brother. They never see their kitchen the same way I see it; they can never erase the images from that dreadful night when Stanley died.

7

MONSTERS

You must remember, a snake gives birth to a snake.

Victor Mthembu, participant in the Boipatong massacre on the murder of a toddler, Aaron Mathope

Against the bright sheen of the new corrugated iron wall of the shack, nine-month-old Aaron Mathope lay face down on a blanket. His aunt sat on the ground next to him, tears drying on her cheeks as she gazed dully at her sister’s son. Aaron was dressed in a baby blue jump-suit and seemed asleep, but there was a deep gash in his head where a blade had been driven deep into his soft little skull. I knew that of all the gory and heart-wrenching scenes I had already photographed that morning, this dead baby was the image that would show the insane cruelty of the attack on the small, anonymous township of Boipatong the night before, that had left at least 45 people dead and 22 injured. But the light sucked. The striking early morning light could have been wonderful, but for Aaron, it was coming from the wrong direction: it fell across the bottom half of his body, leaving his head in shadow-I was shooting slide and the film would not tolerate the contrast. I had to show this dreadful deed, but with the light and shadow the way it was, it would have been an unusable picture. I asked Heidi to stand at the corner of
the shack and block out the sun; but sunlight was still streaming through and so I asked a survivor of the massacre to join Heidi in casting her shadow over Aaron. It bothered me that that I was doing this - was it manipulation of the scene, perhaps an ethical lapse? But I rationalized that it was no different to using a flash, so I took the pictures, images of Aaron’s tiny corpse and his shocked, grieving aunt in beautiful, even tones.