by Deon Meyer
I was ashamed to say that I stopped praying. It was because of the fear, but mostly it was because I felt so incredibly guilty for not being sick.
The man with the gun, he just turned the gun around and shot himself.
I still feel this guilt, every day. But I keep praying, and I keep telling myself, the Lord spared me for a reason. Perhaps it was to help lead these people to Amanzi.
Amanzi
On 3 July in the Year of the Dog we all gathered in the Forum. We were more than three hundred strong. The first, democratic election of leaders was on hand. Pa stood on the back of the Tata. He said he thought we should have a new name for this place, Vanderkloof was in no way suitable.
In the silence that followed, the grey, bent Granny Nandi Mahlangu called out: ‘Amanzi.’
There was a rippling of sounds through the crowd as everyone tried out the name on their tongues. Someone began to clap. Then a wave of applause and everyone was clapping. When it died down, Pa said, ‘Welcome to Amanzi.’
No one explained what it meant, and I was too shy to ask openly. I asked Pa in a whisper only when we were walking home later – ‘home’ was, and would be for the next number of years, the Orphanage that we shared with Beryl and the children, Melinda Swanevelder and her hopeful suitor Hennie Fly Laas, Domingo and Nero Dlamini.
‘It’s the Zulu and Xhosa word for “water”,’ said Pa.
I chewed that over, but couldn’t connect the watery name to the wave of applause. ‘So why did everyone start clapping?’
‘Because it’s perfect.’
Nkosi Sebego
As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.
I was the founding father and pastor of the Grace Tabernacle Church of Christ in Mamelodi. I kept the church open through it all. It was very difficult, because I knew it was God’s way of telling us to change our ways. God sent the Fever, because the whole world had lost its way. But you cannot tell that to the people who are suffering so much, who are dying.
I thought I wasn’t dying, because I was a God-fearing man, a righteous man. But then I saw that God was taking my wife, and she was a better Christian than I was. And he was taking babies, and little children, nobody was being spared the Fever. So then, I did not understand, and I was very angry at God. I shouted and I swore. But I think God knew that it was because of the pain of all the loss and the suffering.
The strange thing was, Mamelodi was a safer place, during and after the Fever, than a lot of the white neighbourhoods. I think most of the black townships were better, because the black people, the poor people, we were used to helping one another, we were much more used to loss and suffering and standing together, and sharing.
Three months after the Fever, we were twenty-nine people in Mamelodi who had survived, living together at the church, helping each other, taking care of each other. And then during that time, I went to Silver Lakes Golf Estate, and Faerie Glen, where all the rich people lived, mostly white people. I went there to look for food. There were no groups, nobody working together. Just a few people shooting at everything that moved.
Domingo
As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.
I was born in Abbotsdale. It’s the coloured township of Malmesbury. I went to school there. My mother worked at the Sasko mill in town. But I was there near Swellendam when the the Fever came. It had a sort of paramilitary occupation. No, I’m not going to elaborate. No need. Useless information.
Nkosi Sebego
As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.
There is one sight I will never forget. It was when the Fever was at its worst. It reminded me of those black-and-white films about the atrocities during the Second World War.
I woke up in the morning, and I heard this engine. You have to remember, this was when the Fever was . . . when it was really bad, so Mamelodi was much quieter than usual, and I heard this big engine. I walked in that direction; it was coming from the open ground between Khutsong and the Pateng Secondary School. This was about one kilometre from the Mamelodi hospital. The engine was a bulldozer. It was pushing people into this mass grave.
It is a terrible thing to see. People. People who laughed, who loved, who lived. And there they were, just rag dolls. Pushed into a hole in the ground. Like rubbish.
Chapter 24
Nero ‘Lucky’ Dlamini
As recorded by Willem Storm. The Amanzi History Project.
Look, I was a dandy, a very snazzy dresser, make no mistake, I was the best-dressed psychologist in the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area. I know, I know, not a difficult achievement, but nonetheless . . .
I don’t deny, my lifestyle was a reaction to the poverty of my youth.
My father only had four years of schooling. He was a labourer, he worked at an auto electrician place in Braamfontein, and he did private auto electrician jobs in our backyard in Orlando East to keep the wolf from the door. My mother worked at Baragwanath, the hospital, the Chris Hani hospital. She at least had grade ten, she did administrative work at the Paediatric Burn Unit; so many nights she would come home, crying over what she had seen in that hospital, the township kids who got burned. Injury by poverty is what she called it.
My father believed ‘Nero’ was a great Roman emperor, classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. So he insisted on christening me that. But he meant well, and he was a wonderful man, he never left my mother, so I forgave him long ago.
Anyway, I was a clever boy, I matriculated in 1999, I earned bursaries, I wanted to do psychology, because I wanted to make sense of the world, really, everybody was so . . . so angry. I went to Wits, in 2006, and then I opened a practice in Sandton. I treated all these nouveau riche black businessmen, and after two years, I thought this is as good as it gets, is this going to be the difference I’m going to make in the world? So I took a sabbatical for six months, I gave it a lot of thought, and I changed course . . .
Long story short, I have always been fascinated by how we absolutely need to be in a relationship. I mean, it consumes us, that need, that terrible need to be loved, to be with someone. The disease of the last decades BF – Before the Fever – was loneliness, lack of being loved. To be with someone, that’s what it’s all about, movies, books, TV, Facebook . . . I had all these patients, rich people, Willem, very rich, highly successful. And so very unhappy. If you cut through all the crap, all they needed was love.
So I specialised in couples therapy. Oh, the stories I could tell.
I liked Nero a lot.
My father liked Nero from day one. Because he was a raconteur. (The first time, when I asked Pa what it meant, Pa said it was a ‘master storyteller’; the word originates from nineteenth-century French, conte meaning ‘story’.) But also because he became Pa’s intellectual sparring partner, because he was a good sounding board, often disagreeing with Pa, and later standing with Pa trying to resist the overwhelming spiritual onslaught of Pastor Nkosi.
In the raconteur version of his decision to travel to Amanzi, he said it was necessity, and the joy of the bicycle.
I wasn’t a competitive cyclist. I was a weekend mountain bike warrior, it was my fitness regime, my way of staying slim to fit into all those snazzy clothes; did I tell you I was a real dandy? I never liked jogging, it’s such an inelegant pastime, so much sweating and jiggling . . . Anyway, my big hope was one day to do the holiday cycling routes in Europe. In the era BF. And then, first months AF, I didn’t think about cycling, it was just survival. I lived in Sandton, and in the early morning I would go scavenging for groceries, because that was the safest, all the dangerous people stayed up late. And it was so damn inelegant to run from the dangerous people . . . I knew I would have to relocate, the resources were dwindling and the dangerous people increasing, but where do you go? And how? I had no idea where and how I would find petrol. I’m not technically minded, despite what my dad did for a living.
Then one day I found your pamphlet in the
street. Hennie Fly’s airdrop pamphlet, and I thought, why don’t I take a bicycle? Of course there was a certain risk, but I thought, who’s going to rob a black man on a bicycle?
There’s this cycle shop, the Cycle Lab Fourways Megastore, where I bought my Silverback Sola 4, my regular bicycle. Every Saturday BF I used to stand and drool over the Cannondale, such a love-hate relationship, you beautiful thing, but how could one pay a hundred and fifty thousand rand for a bicycle? In this country, it’s plain vulgar.
Then I picked up your pamphlet and I liked what I read, and I said, okay, I’m going to that place. So I walked to Cycle Lab, and here’s a fascinating statistic: after the apocalypse, nobody took a single thing from that shop. Nothing. I walked in there and I thought, the Cannondale must have been looted a long time ago, but there it was, together with every other thing that was in that shop, energy bars, water bottles, you name it. So I took the Cannondale bicycle and a Garmin Edge 810 and the very best, smartest and most expensive biking apparel, and I packed the rucksack and off I went. I knew nothing about the dogs; I didn’t even see four dogs, the whole three weeks, the whole six hundred and twenty-nine kilometres; that is the exact distance from that bicycle shop to here, according to the Garmin GPS, before the thing’s batteries went flat. After I got here, I heard about the dogs. And it gave me a fright, take my word for it, a big fright and I thought how lucky I was, how very, very lucky.
He arrived on 2 May in the Year of the Dog. The real reason for his coming we would only discover later. Because 3 May was the first of that bitter winter’s cold fronts – a rare seven centimetres of snow in the autumn, on the edge of the Karoo. Within a day the temperature fell far below freezing, pipes burst, children shivered and romped about in the streets with snowballs. The entire community had to change gears, had to pay attention to emergency repairs, and the generation of heat.
And on 5 May the KTM came. For the first time.
Chapter 25
The KTM
The Karoo, Pa said, got its name from the Khoi people. It means ‘place of great thirst’. It is the great semi-desert in the western part of southern Africa, as big as California, bigger than the whole of Norway.
Before the Fever it might snow once in five or six years in the Karoo, Pa said. Mostly not actual snow, just half a centimetre of icy layer that they called ‘kapok’. That word derived from the Malay, kapoq: there were certain trees in the tropics that formed a sort of woolly white fibre around their fruits, which local people used to stuff cushions and mattresses.
On 3 May of that year the snow in the morning formed a layer seven centimetres thick.
After the snow came the wind and sleet.
Our community didn’t have enough warm clothing for the extreme weather. Nobody had thought to collect firewood for the winter either. For a few days the roads were almost impassable.
Jacob Mahlangu, grandson of old Granny Nandi, and I were appointed as shepherds, a task that we performed every second week when we were not attending school. But on 5 May there was no school for anyone, and we hitched a lift on the back of the old municipal tractor driven by Hennie Fly. It took over an hour to reach the reserve up in the mountains. In the veld we had to shovel and sweep snow off the grass so that our growing flocks and herds of sheep and cattle could have a few places where they could graze. Then we went to fetch wood, which we had to chop and saw and lug to the trailer. It was hard physical work; we were wet and cold and by late afternoon very hungry.
Normally we would help Domingo clean rifles in the evenings. But on the night of 5 May I was too tired. Pa and Nero Dlamini and Ravi Pillay sat in a circle in the big sitting room of the Orphanage and debated the possibility that so much smoke in the atmosphere was responsible for this extreme and unusual weather – the smoke of fires all over the world, from hastily evacuated industries and overheating nuclear reactors and uncontrolled forest fires and even the whole cities in densely populated countries that could go up in flames due to gas leaks, for example. Not one of them could remember this kind of intense cold, so much snow in southern Africa, so early in the year.
Domingo sat apart, as was his habit. He oiled and cleaned five R4 rifles, part of the arsenal that had been brought from the De Aar army base storage facility. Every evening he did five new ones, and in the morning he would take them back to our magazine. Domingo kept two hundred rifles and ammunition in the safe of the old police station – the guns that he cleaned. And another few thousand guns and a store of ammunition he kept quietly in a secret location that only the Committee – and I, the eavesdropper – knew about. The storage shed of the nature reserve, seven kilometres out of the town, up the mountain. Beyond the gate and the fence, remote.
Domingo’s movements were rhythmic, ordered, practised. Soothing to an exhausted, dozing thirteen-year-old.
Then he stopped suddenly, and looked up at the front door. ‘People,’ he said.
Pa sighed. There had been people here all day, to come and report some new crisis, more damage or another emergency.
Domingo put down the gun, stood up, and went to the front door. Only then came the hard, urgent knock.
I was awake, I watched Pa and Ravi rise to their feet. Domingo opened the door, an icy wind blew in; a strange woman stood outside. She was tall and imposing and beautiful, with grey streaks in her hair, though she was not old. She spoke, but I could not hear. Domingo looked at her, and the people behind her. At last Pa said, ‘Let them in.’
Domingo hesitated.
Then he stepped out of the way. The woman entered. Behind her, another four women, and three men, all under fifty years old, strangers. Pa invited them to sit. The woman introduced herself. She had a melodic voice, and said her name was Mecky Zulu. They were sorry to arrive so late, they had meant to arrive earlier today, but their minibus had broken down before Venterstad. A bearded man in his forties introduced himself as Hans Trunkenpolz. They’d found our pamphlets in Steynsburg; it had taken them two days to reach us, because of the snow and car trouble.
Pa welcomed them, invited them to sit near the fire, asked them if they had eaten and went to the kitchen himself to fetch rusks and coffee, while the bishop chatted to the new arrivals.
Domingo stood observing them. Then he went to the kitchen as well. I followed, curious, because I could see his unease.
‘They’re lying,’ said Domingo behind the closed kitchen door.
‘About what?’ asked Pa.
‘About the minibus breaking down.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Their hands are clean.’
‘Domingo, we don’t know what broke, it doesn’t mean—’
‘Where are the children, the old people?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They are not a natural group. They are all . . . fighting age. All alert . . .’
‘Five are women . . .’
Domingo frowned. ‘Willem, there is something about them . . .’
Pa smiled. ‘I appreciate your concern, but they seem to me to be ordinary, good people, and they are hungry and tired.’ With that he carried the tray through into the sitting room.
Trunkenpolz and Mecky Zulu did most of the talking. They said they were all from the east coast: Margate, Durban, Umhlanga and Richards Bay. They’d found each other gradually after the chaos. And then they began to travel, in search of security. Mecky was a Zulu princess, said Trunkenpolz respectfully. And he was an engineer.
‘That’s very good news,’ said Pa. ‘We urgently need an engineer. What other professions does your group have?’
Before they could answer, Domingo asked, ‘What was wrong with the minibus?’
‘Excuse me?’ said Trunkenpolz.
‘The vehicle that broke down. What happened?’
‘The carburettor . . . We think the petrol in the filling stations is starting to degrade. We had to clean the carburettor. Totally. It took us a few hours to find the bloody cause . . .’
Domingo nodded.
‘Come,’ said Pa. ‘You can sleep right here in the Orphanage tonight.’
Domingo came knocking on our door when everyone went to their rooms. Pa opened up. Domingo entered, gun in his hand. ‘I don’t trust them.’
‘Let’s get some sleep,’ said Pa, in his that’s-enough-of-that voice.
‘None of them smell of petrol. You can’t clean a carburettor and not smell of petrol.’
‘Please, Domingo, we talk about this tomorrow.’
The KTM robbed us just before noon on 6 May, but I wasn’t there. Jacob Mahlangu and I had to take the quadbike up the mountain, to make sure the livestock had grazing, and to drive away any predators. We were late coming back in the afternoon, since the snow still lay deep up in the reserve, the ground roads were muddy, and very slippery.
When we eventually got back to Amanzi, we heard the whole story.
That morning Pa and Pastor Nkosi gave Mecky Zulu, Trunkenpolz and the new arrivals a substantial breakfast and a thorough tour of the town and all the key sights. They pretended to choose houses for themselves, came down to do the admin at the old post office and collected their rations where we stored most of our food in the old OK Value supermarket.
Domingo sat in front of the police station watching, R4 in his hands. He was the only inhabitant of Amanzi who was armed. Trunkenpolz and Mecky approached him. Trunkenpolz asked him a question about the gun to divert his attention. Zulu pulled a pistol out of her handbag and pressed it against Domingo’s head and said, ‘Give him the gun.’
