isn’t here, he never came home,’ Nomkhitha stammered, drawing a blanket around her nightgown.
‘Where is he staying?’
‘We don’t know.’
Disgruntled, the policemen stormed out of the house. Joseph, Nomkhitha and the children stood silently around the dining-room table, trying to calm their pounding hearts; the littlest ones shivered from the cold and fear. Nomkhitha put the younger children back into bed. Then she, Joseph and the others began tidying up the chaos the police had left in their wake. They had just finished and were drifting off to sleep when they heard a thunderous noise: torches shone in every window, guns appeared silhouetted against the light, men yelled in Afrikaans that they were going to kick in the door. Joseph raced from his bed to unlock the bolt. And another raid began.
From that time forward, night after night, the police conducted raids on the Mashinini home. Often, they came several times within the span of a few hours. They inflicted a kind of psychological terror upon the family, especially on the youngest members. As the last rays of sunlight disappeared and darkness descended on the township, some of the younger children would start asking Nomkhitha, ‘Will the police come tonight? Will the police come tonight?’ They took to waking at every noise, running to their parents’ bed. At the first hint of the approaching ‘hippos’, the youngsters roused everyone; the family was usually waiting for the police when they came.
Eventually, Nomkhitha’s exhaustion and fury at having her home violated overpowered her fear. ‘Get out of my bedroom!’ she shrieked at the policemen busy dumping the contents of her dresser on the floor. ‘How dare you touch my things!’ Once, she began scolding the security men about their weapons. ‘I will not answer your questions if you have all these big guns in my house. Get out with these guns, they are frightening my children, they can’t sleep at night.’ Surprisingly, the policemen complied by putting the larger weapons outside in their cars; the commanding officer explained to Joseph they had to keep their sidearms for their own protection.
On another occasion, Nomkhitha refused to respond to their interrogation until they sat down on chairs. ‘It’s not my culture!’ she shouted at one group. ‘Take seats if you want to talk to me. Take seats!’ Nomkhitha yelled at the policemen in Xhosa and English; they swore back at her in Afrikaans, muttering about this kaffir bitch who gives birth to terrorists. The adversaries made for a striking scene, exchanging insults in mutually unintelligible languages in the dead of night.
Nomkhitha’s stridency drove Joseph mad. In contrast to his wife, Joseph was calm, polite, careful not to do anything to upset the intruders. After the police left, Joseph would beseech Nomkhitha not to provoke them; he feared the security officers might do something horrible because of her belligerence. Nomkhitha retorted that he was too passive. But her outbursts frightened the children too. Tshepiso would clamp his hands over his ears to shut out the exchanges between his mother and the policemen, repeating to himself: I wish she would be quiet, I wish she would be quiet.
Even after the security officers withdrew, the Mashinini house remained under constant surveillance. A Volkswagen Beetle was always parked, rather conspicuously, across the street; a second one was stationed up the road. Nonetheless, Tsietsi managed to sneak home every few days. He would furtively approach the back of his family’s lot and peer through the leaves that covered the fence. If no policemen were visible, he would give a high-pitched whistle that his siblings recognized. The noise brought them racing to the yard. Tsietsi sent one of them to the front as a lookout, while the others eagerly plied him with questions about his activities. He recounted stories of his escapades and taught the youngsters revolutionary slogans. ‘Amandla!’ they chanted, their clenched fists punching the air, ‘Black Power!’ If he were feeling particularly bold, Tsietsi entered the house to have a bath, change his clothes, eat a meal – all the while singing anti-apartheid songs. Sometimes he stayed for as long as an hour. Then Tsietsi would creep back to the fence, check the area for ‘hippos’, and disappear into the labyrinth of Soweto’s back-yards.
Nomkhitha eagerly awaited Tsietsi’s visits; they allowed her to know that he was alive. But she also feared for his safety every minute he spent at home. With all the raids and surveillance, the police were bound to find Tsietsi in the house one day. Nomkhitha could not understand why they kept missing him. She began to suspect they were trailing Tsietsi, hoping he would lead them to fellow student leaders. Or perhaps the black policemen, who often watched the house without their white commanding officer, secretly sympathized with the uprising.
Although the police did not catch Tsietsi, they almost captured Rocks. He had returned to Soweto when his college closed a few days after the uprising began. Rocks slept at home on the first night; after experiencing the police raids, he decided it would be safer to stay with friends. He went back to the house at the end of the week to retrieve his luggage, which he had posted to himself. Rocks was in the bedroom, examining the banned literature that filled the suitcase and waiting for Tshepiso to bring him a sandwich from a nearby café, when the police surrounded the house. Rocks tried to flee through the back door, but to no avail: policemen, their guns drawn, were everywhere.
Rocks opened the door. The police swarmed into the room; an officer ordered Rocks to produce his pass book. ‘Where is Tsietsi?’ he demanded. ‘Where does he sleep?’
‘I really don’t know, I’ve just got back from college,’ Rocks answered, speaking rapidly. ‘Look, here’s my ID, here’s my suitcase, you can see where it was sent from. I have no idea where Tsietsi is.’
The officer ordered his men to search the house; one of them looked at the labels on the closed suitcase without bothering to open it. The policemen marched Rocks outside, presumably to take him away for interrogation. By then, a mass of youths from the neighbourhood had gathered around the patrol cars. Perhaps concerned about causing yet another violent incident, the officer told Rocks to report to a particular room at police headquarters the next day. As the security men drove away, Tshepiso appeared with Rocks’ food. Unnerved by the encounter, Rocks told Tshepiso to eat the sandwich; he grabbed his suitcase and left.
For the first weeks after the uprising, Tsietsi and his fellow activists helped with the burials of the children who had been killed by the police. This was no easy task. The government refused to publish a list of the dead; the Action Committee members had to rely on rumours of which families had been affected and where they resided. The student leaders were helped by the Black Parents’ Association, a newly formed group of Soweto professionals. The BPA got undertakers to donate coffins to the grieving families and the taxi association to provide, at no cost, 700 taxis for transportation to the funerals. Tsietsi spent his days traversing Soweto with Winnie Mandela, a prominent figure in the BPA.
Around this time, the few representatives of the exiled liberation organizations in South Africa attempted to recruit Tsietsi and other members of the Action Committee. Tsietsi debated with Khotso Seatlholo the merits of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and rejected them both. Tsietsi sensed the groups were trying to steal the students’ glory and take credit for the uprising. ‘Where have these guys been all these years?’ he asked Khotso. Tsietsi was most disturbed by the ANC’s Freedom Charter; he could not accept the idea that the country belonged to everyone who lived there. Whites, he believed, tended to impose themselves and their vision on the fight for liberation. It was not for them to tell blacks how to conduct their struggle.
Tsietsi preferred the advice of veterans like Drake Koka, who had remained in the country and assimilated the militancy of the Black Consciousness movement. Besides being a leader in the movement, Drake had the additional allure of having organized an independent black trade union. Tsietsi and some of his colleagues met with Drake late on Wednesday nights in a house in Dube. They christened it ‘The House of Exile’, after a Jimmy Cliff song: the conspirators anticipated they would soon be in exile because of their activities. Drake discussed
