Thomas Moyo was too black. Or so they told him the night they came.
The old plywood he’d found at the Marlborough dumpsite and put up as into a door, complied with a crack as they kicked it down.
The rusted twist of wire he’d threaded through the doorframe pole as a lock, betrayed him. With a clang it snapped and gave way.
As they moved about the shack, the frame of sheet iron clattered into the ochre dust, offering no resistance. The pathetic walls that had once sheltered him, gave him up.
When they came for Thomas Moyo, there was nowhere he could hide.
Because Thomas Moyo was too black. At least for these parts of Africa.
If you lifted his shirt- sleeve and exposed his bony forearm, there was no telltale circular scar that the young men of his generation are supposed to have since babyhood. Those badges of belonging in this great city – showing they had been weighed and given shots at the government clinic.
He wasn’t up to date on who was sleeping with whom in Generations, the country’s most popular show.
And though his friend Mandla couldn’t live without it, Thomas Moyo didn’t jive to kwaito music at the local tavern where they hung out every Friday night.
“The thing about you people, you’re just here to take our women with your funny music and your long traditional weapons, heh?”
A slurring, fat man stumbled over to the two young men standing in a corner near the door. The smell of cheap liquor seeped through his pores and oozed out of the sweat on his chizkop.
He leaned in close. His eyes were bloodshot, but deliberate, and focused. Thomas could smell his sour breath.
He was typical of the last Friday of the month crowd. Men straight off the train from the city, pouring their wages down their gullets before sunset.
They’d return to their homes, and their women – spent, broke, and spoiling for a fight. This one wasn’t going to wait.
The sweaty tormentor cupped a hand over his crotch and gesticulated wildly.
“But it’s not true, is it? There’s nothing like my big Zulu weapon!”
“You want to see it?’”
He fumbled for his zipper. Behind him, one of the man’s friends slurred encouragingly.
Thomas tried to look away. The intoxicated slug grabbed his arm.
“Hey, look at me when I’m talking to you, blackie!”
The glass of stout in his other hand spilled onto the man’s trousers. He swore and wiped at the stream of saliva from the side of his mouth
“Come, I’ll show you a real South African weapon, wena mnyama.”
He shoved Thomas.
“Na, man, leave it, leave it, we believe yours is bigger.” Mandla put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man’s cheerleaders remonstrated angrily with Mandla, seeing their fun had been cut short.
He cocked his head in his friend’s direction and gestured to the door. They put down their half-finished drinks.
“Gents, next time,” Mandla said to nobody in particular.
“Sharp-sharp.”
They didn’t turn around as the two men left.
“Let’s go home, kwerekwere,” Mandla elbowed his friend playfully.
Thomas knew his friend, his keeper and protector, was joking.
They had grown up together, and lived side by side, on the same side of Burundi Street in Extension Two.
When twelve year-old Sonto Mthembu put his hand on her breast behind the school toilet shed in Grade 6, Thomas told Mandla first.
And the cold April afternoon his young mother breathed her last on her cot in the shack they shared– it was on Thomas’ shoulder that Mandla wept.
Even after the whispers began. And the people of Extension Two averted their eyes when they saw the orphaned boy begging along London road. When his mother was alive, there were no fences between the shacks, and the women would invite him in to share a plate of meat and rice with their own boys.
But after the ladies of the burial society had her safely interred, their tongues held back no longer.
Soon the gossip reached Mandla’s ears.
That she’d died of that thing that was filling up Avalon Cemetery in Soweto – and now it was here- among the decent people.
The women said, with glee, that his quiet, churchgoing mother, who spent nearly half her life scrubbing the floors in the white kitchens of Johannesburg, had got what she deserved.
She was isifebe – a drunken whore. How else would she have money, with no man?
Thomas and his mother fashioned another small bed out of crates and a used foam mattress and put it in the corner of their shack. Until she too died, of a broken heart – Mandla lived in their home.
They had planned since they were boys that they would go into business together. For three years they washed taxis at the rank until they had saved enough start-up money.
Now here they were; selling second-hand handsets and airtime to love-struck schoolgirls with heavy thighs and scandalous hems.
The tall, thin and shy Thomas and the short, wiry and brash Mandla were abofwethu – brothers.
But Thomas was too black.
It was all the fault of his too black father, Velapi Moyo, who arrived in Johannesburg twenty-one years ago caked with dirt, and dirt-poor.
He had walked for five straight days all the way from across the Limpopo.
Velapi Moyo had nothing. He had left with nothing from Esigodini, that place where poverty and the pall of despair hung over the town in a perpetually dusty haze.
The clan was starving. The rains hadn’t come, and the children soon grew fearful of the worried faces of the adults… who knew what was coming but said nothing.
The chimurenga had come and gone. And as the clan elder said, shaking his head bitterly, the speeches of The Leader in Harare would be tastier between two slices of bread.
He began saying the unthinkable; life was worse now than under the whites. At least they had work then and could feed themselves.
Some of the women left to do charring the big city. Others took in washing from their better off neighbors whose daughters were teachers in Bulawayo.
But Velapi Moyo had heard there was hope across the Limpopo, in the City of Gold.
If he could just get to Johannesburg, he would be able to find a job and send money home.
The night he left he promised his grandmother he would return and bring her a new kanga to tie around her waist.
“No, grandmother, you mustn’t cry,” he said, cradling the old woman’s head in his hands.
“At the end of July, I will send word through Marechera’s son for you to collect from the building society in Bulawayo.”
Velapi Moyo was never seen in Esigodini again.
But every month on the last day, the grandmother would wake before dawn and lay out her best clothes on her bed.
Stolid and confident despite her ninety years, she would be on the main road at first light. Soon the thunder of dust and stones would announce the arrival of Marechera’s son in his pickup.
The skull-faced youngster with the sly eyes of his father had long smelled the old woman’s desperation and knew how much she would pay for the favour.
What he charged her was enough to fill his tank five times over. The thought of how much money he would make out of these trips was enough to make him smile, and hum tunes all the way to the city, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
It was always the same.
He’d usher the old lady into the building society then go wait outside. He’d leave her in the queue, and after an hour she would reach the front of the queue. She would hand over her frayed brown identity book and be issued with the five hundred from her grandson in the City of Gold.
Half would go to Marechera’s son, and the rest to feed her family.
But before they got into the pickup and drove back home, Marechera’s son would stop at the Athena Café on 14th street downtown.
The grandmother waited in the idling van as he went inside and ordered the usual. A soft drink and two yellow sponge cupcakes for each of them. It was her only treat until the next month came again. There was food to buy, and school uniforms for the great-grandchildren.
But one day, the money stopped coming.
“I told you, it isn’t here,” said the clerk behind the glass, a young girl with a stubborn eyes and a pouted lower lip.
“But there must be some kind of mistake, check again…” The old woman’s voice was plaintive.
“I’ve checked three times, maybe your son is dead,” the girl said rudely. She rang the bell signaling the turn of the next customer – and turned away from the old woman.
The grandmother shuffled out of the building into the waiting car and sat there silently, too ashamed to tell Marechera’s son what had happened.
She knew they were all secretly jealous of her grandson. They’d start talking about how the Moyo’s thought they were better than everyone else, but they were really like the rest of them – poor, and disappointed.
“Athena cafe, granny?” he enquired, smiling.
“Not today, my child, I’m not feeling well.” She folded her arms in her lap and looked out of the window, so he could not see the tears running down her cheeks.
His family couldn’t have known, but the grandmother knew. Velapi Moyo had found a woman.
A Johannesburg woman.
The type everyone in Esigodini had heard of – who eats men’s money and churns out fatherless babies twice a year.
They used powerful fetishes to ensnare men and make them forget their other families.
Johannesburg women, the women of Esigodini whispered, were loose, and didn’t take care of themselves. That’s why they latched onto good men, to make them take care of them and their bastards. So, he will never be able to send money back home.
Until the grandmother died in her sleep many years later, she dreamt of the taste of that yellow sponge cake.
IV
A week after his birth Thomas Moyo’s mother wrapped him in the brown blanket in the custom of her people and climbed into the taxi that would take her to register his birth at Home Affairs in Harrison street.
There, in black ink in the ledger of births and registrations, the arrival of her firstborn was duly noted.
Velapi Moyo stood at her side in a stiff grey suit his woman had got on hire purchase from the Indian shops. He nodded gruffly at the clerk, and as per the laws of the land, was asked to sign next to the box on paternity.
A taxi took them to the mother’s family home, where a goat was slaughtered in honor of the ancestors, and a bracelet of skin wrapped around the child’s right wrist.
He was called Thabo – a joy to his family. His proud mother would now be addressed by her title, MaThabo.
Just months later, despair at his unexplained absences, and her own loneliness would draw MaThabo away from Velapi Moyo, and into the bosom of the church.
When the time came for him to be baptized, the priest told her she had to give her son a Christian name.
She had been reading the bible and decided on Thomas, the apostle who doubted. As she too doubted the intentions of the boy’s father.
The priest had also told her to stop living in sin.
It was asking too much of Velapi Moyo, whose restless spirit at nights still carried him across the Limpopo to the dust of Esigodini.
He imagined the sight of the homestead and imagined all the young girls he had loved and disappointed in his village.
The lonely man, a tree without roots in the mighty Johannesburg, longed to hear their melodies of love in his language again.
But Velapi Moyo knew he would never go back. He was a lowly security guard, watching cars outside shopping malls, and hustling for tips.
Nothing of the man the people at home imagined him to be.
He had a bastard son from a woman he was drawn to – because he was a man and a man had needs.
But he knew he would never marry this woman who had given herself so eagerly to him and may be just as generous with her favors when he was not there.
The day MaThabo came from church with her sisters, dressed in white and carrying the newly baptized Thomas, he was gone.
Word of Velapi Moyo came to the township every now and again. He was living with this or that woman. Or he had gone back to Zimbabwe. Or that he was dead.
Every few years, word of him would reach MaThabo and her son. Someone had been drinking with him in a tavern somewhere. The drunken man, it was said, would rave like a madman, laughing and crying at the same time.
“My son, my son…” he’d slur at them, stabbing a finger into his chest for effect.
“‘My real South African son; he’ll become something one day!”
Unlike his kwerekwere father.
Thomas Moyo got his first lesson on being too black on his first day of school.
The class of seven year-olds was instructed to stand up, one by one, and introduce themselves. When it came to his turn, the shy, thin boy, despite his height, stood behind the desk, hoping the teacher would pass him by.
“What do they call you, boy?”
“Thomas.”
“‘Well, are you the Son of God, Thomas? What is your father’s name?” The others tittered.
“Thomas Moyo, teacher…”
“What’s Moyo? This isn’t a Shona kraal, boy!”
The teacher was enjoying herself; and was encouraged by the laughter of a group of boys.
“Are you South African?”
“Yes, teacher.”
“Where were you born?”
“East Rand Hospital, I mean, Alexandra, teacher.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
The boy paled. His father was a vague memory, whose name was forbidden from being spoken in his mother’s house.
Besides the elongated face and mournful eyes of his son, there was no sign Velapi Moyo had even existed. Like the rush of water polishing the stones of the riverbed, the father’s image had faded from his son’s memory.
“‘I, I don’t know teacher”. Thomas felt the tears welling up in his eyes; and fixed them on the ceiling.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.”
Sitting next to him, a short, squat, yellow-skinned boy with a huge gap in his front teeth elbowed Thomas painfully.
“So why are you so black? South Africans aren’t so black!” the teacher exclaimed, clapping her hands together.
The woman looked around the classroom for the affirmation that came in guffaws from the boys.
Thomas looked down.
“Answer, black thing, answer!” the yellow boy rasped through the gap in his teeth.
“Hey, myeke, leave him!” came a voice from behind him. The yellow-skinned tormentor fell forward as he was shoved from behind. Thomas turned to see a stocky, tough looking boy with dark skin.
Since that day, Mandla took it upon himself to be Thomas’ protector. He too was fatherless, but anyone in the class who dared to ask knew they’d be asking for trouble.
“I can take care of myself,” he bragged on the soccer pitch at break time. “I hope that bastard doesn’t cross my path because I’ll show him.”
What Mandla lacked in the reading and arithmetic department he made up for in brawn. His mother and his now invisible father’s people were from rural Zululand. He said he was as pure as they come – from a nation known for needing no excuse to use their fists.
Thomas responded to taunts with silence. The boys mocked his fatherlessness, his non- South African sounding surname, and his blackness.
“Where did you get so black, have you been driving the sun?”
“Wena Thomas, I’ve run out of shoe polish, can you lend me your head!’’
It was worse when Mandla wasn’t around. To support himself and his mother he sometimes ducked school to sell loose cigarettes at the taxi rank.
The boys would corner Thomas behind the woodwork classroom and order him to speak Shona.
But he’d grown up speaking the language of his mother’s people.
Their language. The right language for this part of Africa.
He’d once asked his mother if she knew any Shona from the days she was with his father. She clicked her tongue impatiently.
“Why do you want to learn that kwerekwere language?”
He knew the boys in the playground wouldn’t believe him, but he would rather endure the beatings than pretend to speak a language no real South African understood. Here, in the land of Mandela, there was no black in the rainbow nation, only acceptable grey shades in between, with names like Zulu, and Xhosa.
And anyway, Thomas Moyo was too black.
When Mandla finally decided school was not for him, Thomas too packed his satchel for the last time and strolled out of the school gate. For weeks, his mother would beg and plead with them, but where Mandla was going, so was Thomas. She was sad, then angry. She blamed her son’s friend for corrupting him.
“Typical Zulu, no brains!” she’d scream, as Thomas begged her to not make a scene. But she loved Mandla, and he loved his adopted mother.
Suddenly, without any real warning, everything changed in Extension Two.
His mother had read something about it in the papers about trouble on the West Rand involving some miners and a local woman.
The street committees in the township had gone on a rampage and burned their houses. He hadn’t given it too much thought.
As Thomas walked to the taxi rank, he passed a group of boys smoking at the street corner.
“Go home, kwerekwere!”
But this was his home, his only home.
But it didn’t help that Thomas Moyo was too black.
The very next afternoon as he tried to get into a taxi downtown, he felt himself being pulled out backwards. The unseen assailant grabbed his belt and yanked him out just as the taxi sped off.
He swung around to see two policemen.
“Hey kwerekwere, where’s your pass?” said the one, a heavy-set giant with cruel eyes.
Thomas Moyo didn’t carry a pass. Or refugee papers. Or a passport. He was a South African.
He had learned in school about passes. His mother’s mother had told him about passes. The whites made them carry passes in the days of apartheid.
Like the one she had to carry when she had to get up at dawn to make the train that would take her to the hotel kitchen in Boksburg where she worked as a cleaner.
Sometimes when she was late for work, she forgot her pass at home. Terror would grip her as she walked that short stretch from the station to her employer’s home, head down and quick – in case somebody saw right through her and realized her crime.
“But grandmother, why did you agree to carry the pass?” he asked her.
The old woman patted her young grandson’s head and smiled.
“Because we had to.”
“But why didn’t you refuse?”
“Ah, you ask too many questions, my son,” the woman said, and would give him a two rand to go buy sweets at the corner shops.
Thomas Moyo knew that if he was ever asked to carry a pass that he would refuse.
This was the South Africa of Mandela, and everyone had the right to walk free.
He turned on the policemen.
“I don’t carry a pass, this isn’t apartheid!”
One of them grabbed Thomas around the neck. He yelped and tried to shield his head from the blow, but he felt the heavy thud as the policeman’s knuckles connected with his skull.
Around them, in the busiest street in Johannesburg, people went about their business as though there were nothing wrong. Nobody turned around.
The policeman’s sidekick brought his face up to Thomas’ as he struggled to free himself.
“What’s an elbow in Zulu, you fucking kwerekwere?”
The policemen had learned well from the apartheid police who put pencils in light-skinned black women’s hair to decide where they should live.
They had received instructions from head office to root out the immigrants in town.
But many of the vermin had intermarried, impregnated local woman to get papers, and learned their language.
They were becoming harder to spot. But this word, indololwane – so old-fashioned nobody used it – would only be known by a true South African.
Thomas Moyo had no idea what the word elbow was in Zulu. Or in Shona. Or in the language he spoke every day.
The bigger policeman stuck his hand into Thomas’ back pocket and felt around for his wallet. He suddenly felt a rush of anger and pushed the policeman. The two fell upon him instantly, kicking him in the side and shoving his face into the dirt of the road. He flailed and kicked out, but he was no match for the truncheons of the two heavyset constables.
“You think you’re clever, you think you’re clever!” the one kept shouting.
Thomas tried to scream but instead swallowed a mouthful of dirt. The policeman pushed him face down to the ground. His arms were pinned behind his back. The bigger policeman aimed a boot at his head. He winced and tried to duck from the blow. But the boot landed at the side his temple.
When he opened his eyes, two girls in school uniform were staring intently at him. He groaned and opened his eyes. One felt swollen and bunged up.
People were walking by as though nothing had happened. He was bleeding in the gutter in the middle of Johannesburg, and nobody turned around. He felt around for his wallet in his back pocket. It was gone. So was his cellphone.
He got up and dusted himself off and staggered off down the street. It was a small price to pay.
After all, he was too black.
When “the trouble” began Thomas Moyo didn’t think they would come knocking at his door.
Everyone knew who he was. His primary school teachers lived two streets down.
There were at least three from among his mother’s people in the township. And though she was away visiting her friends in Soweto, she was just a phone call away, in case they needed to check. She had his birth certificate.
Everyone had seen him at the stall and bought airtime.
They knew that despite his blackness, he was one of them.
But the night they eventually came for Thomas Moyo, there was no escape, and no lousy coins to pay for his freedom.
The scrape of pangas on the asphalt, and the hammering on the doors were straight out of hell.
Three days before, the street committees had a meeting outside the library in Extension 5. They began with less than ten people, but an hour later there were hundreds. There were men, women and children.
The foreigners are committing crimes, they said.
“Yes!” shouted a fat woman in a transparent blouse and a beige skirt; “My daughter was almost raped the other day by one of these cockroaches!”
Her voice turned to a shrill scream. The crowd roared. A man began striking the air with a whip.
“The Barakas…they’re selling bread for half price, and I’m losing business! They should go sell in Somalia not here!” a man yelled.
Another man suggested marching on the foreigners’ homes tonight.
“No, no” an old man implored. “The police will come.”
But the crowd had smelled blood and pushed the old man aside. Now would be the time they got their own back on the bloodsucking foreigners.
Just that morning, the Somali shopkeepers in Extension 5 were seen packing some boxes into their van at the back of the store. Then they came to roll down the metal gate and locked up, before speeding away.
“‘Look at them, running like rats from the Jukskei river in full flood,” the women laughed.
Thomas Moyo never got to explain the night they came.
He couldn’t leave. Or go, as they constantly warned him, back to where he came from.
They beat down his door and fell upon him with clubs and knives. As they paused over his beaten and broken body, they were laughing. One lit a cigarette.
They, the sons and daughters of Mandela – had cleansed the township of another blood-sucking foreigner.
They were, as everyone knew, too black.
The two sisters in the shack next to his were screaming as they were pulled outside into the wintry air in their nightdresses.
The street committee had been told the women were sluts who had Nigerian boyfriends who bought them clothes and airtime for their phones. They would be whipped.
The younger girl sobbed and pleaded, grasping at the remaining shreds of her nightdress to cover her private parts.
She grasped for her older sister, who was screaming as dozens of hands clawed at her, pulling her clothes from her body.
A handful of her braids lay scattered in the dirt, torn off her head by the men of the committee. Her left eye was swollen. She was to be paraded naked around the township that night, as a lesson to other women who were thinking of committing similar crimes.
The women’s screams were the last sound Thomas Moyo heard as they drove the knife into the side of his neck.
Like a stunned log, he fell without a sound.
The wound gurgled horribly. The body jerked in a last vain attempt to not die. Then it stopped. He, Thomas, became “it.”
The men stood over their victim. One dragged on his cigarette, and flicked ash over the lifeless man.
They turned around, as they heard the footsteps of their leader.
From amongst the shouting and the screams, and the crackle of burning wood, came a voice:
“Is the kwerekwere dead?”
It was Mandla’s.
