quiet, looking at the rocky twenty-metre fall.
After a while he said, ‘He fell here.’
Some morning light revealed a gentler route down. We followed him down and into a shrubby area. The rising sun uncovered it so clearly, the dense forest before us.
‘He is here.’ Manqele pointed to the forest.
Detective Shange called the Dog Unit. During the wait for sniffer dogs, Manqele suddenly walked into the forest. Shange took off the vest beneath his shirt and left it on a small tree for the Dog Unit to find and track us when they arrived. We stayed on Manqele’s heels, following him for over an hour. We looked around, calling out Simphiwe’s name. Manqele’s step grew less sure when we came to a clearer part inside the forest. He walked slowly, stopped and looked back to the dense trees we’d just negotiated. We turned to look back and saw the Dog Unit emerge. Two officers, white and black. Two hounds, both German shepherds.
The dogs eagerly sniffed Simphiwe’s T-shirt and led the way further into the forest. At a stream they stopped and seemed confused. One barked towards downstream, the other sensed something upstream. The officers untied their leashes. They went off like bullets in opposite directions. Uncle Clive followed downstream with Shange and one Dog Unit officer; I went upstream with Manqele and the other officer.
We did not chase the dog far. Hardly fifty metres upstream we found the beast barking savagely. The dog that sensed something downstream returned, a muddy object clenched in its jaw. Uncle Clive, Shange and the Dog Unit officer followed behind, winded. A tree branch scraped dirt from the muddy object, and I saw the colours red and black. Both dogs now went crazy, barking in the same direction across the stream, but were hesitant to cross.
I saw red and black, and went as berserk as those sniffer dogs. I ran across the stream, went up an incline and found Simphiwe. He was just lying there with his eyes open, his body resting like he was in deep sleep. At first I thought what I saw was a smile on his face, but it was his dislocated jaw. His body swollen, hands like claws. The twenty-metre fall had broken him internally – later it was revealed he had a punctured lung, broken ribs, shattered right collar bone. I imagined him stumbling in pain until his final collapse, here. How long had it taken for him to die? I felt his cold neck, closed his eyes and I sat next to his body until the undertaker arrived.
* * *
The resilience of our bleeding hearts accepted he was gone and searched for the light.
‘He was handsome,’ said Aunt Busi.
‘Lost,’ said Uncle Sbu.
‘But with that brain and vision he could have been a great somebody,’ added Uncle Clive.
‘My baby was gifted,’ Ma said.
His karate coach called him a talent, his running coach declared him a natural runner.
I said, ‘He has joined our father.’
And I remembered him. Not as the addict he was in the end, but the way he was before the wunga.
Never Forgotten
For Aphiwe, braiding her grandmother’s hair has become their ritual bonding time. There is something sacred about hair.
The two of them are even closer since Gogo was diagnosed with heart failure and moved in with Aphiwe and her parents in the suburb of Amanzimtoti. Now there is always time and opportunity to work on her grandmother’s hair.
‘Your hair is easy to braid, Gogo,’ she says as her fingers move quickly. ‘It’s not silky like mine.’
‘Don’t you like your hair, Aphi?’
‘It’s all right, Gogo, but I want to do dreadlocks and it’s not possible with my type of hair.’
‘It’s because you take after your mother.’
‘Yes, I know, but she doesn’t take after you … Well, not as far as hair is concerned, that is.’ In temperament they are alike, Aphiwe thinks and smiles. Since she can remember, Gogo has always been fiercely independent and notoriously stubborn. Her mother is no different.
Aphiwe’s phone vibrates and she stops her work to look at the screen.
Can you braid my hair next
week Saturday? I’m in Cato
Manor. How much do you
charge?
The message is accompanied by a picture of the style of braiding. Aphiwe looks at it and replies:
Yes. I charge 350 for this. Where are you in Cato Manor?
The client responds immediately:
I’m by Mkhumbane Community Hall.
She follows this with a pinned location via WhatsApp.
‘My braiding business is going well, Gogo,’ Aphiwe says cheerfully. ‘That was another client. She wants me to braid her hair in Cato Manor next Saturday.’
There is a rare smile on Gogo’s face.
‘Do you know anything about old Cato Manor, Aphi?’ she asks.
‘We learned about the forced removals of Cato Manor residents during apartheid when I was in high school, but I can’t remember much.’
‘No, Aphi, that was the end of Cato Manor,’ Gogo says and shakes her head. ‘I’m talking about life there, the people.’ There is a glint in Gogo’s eyes that Aphiwe has never before witnessed.
‘Why? Did you ever live there, Gogo?’
‘I was born there. I lived the happiest days of my life in Cato Manor.’
Aphiwe is surprised. Gogo never talks about the days of her youth. Aphiwe has never seen even one photo of Gogo as a young girl. The subject of Gogo’s past has been off limits even to Aphiwe’s mother, Gogo’s only child. ‘Leave the past to the past,’ Gogo would say when Aphiwe’s mom asked about family history.
‘Tell me all about it,’ says Aphiwe, hoping that her grandmother will not clam up again.
‘I grew up in a lovely household in Cato Manor, Aphi. My family had a large piece of land where we played. We had a functioning farm.’
‘A large piece of land, back then?’ Aphiwe is sceptical. ‘Wasn’t Cato Manor a whites-only area?’
‘Cato Manor was a place for all people – black, white, Coloured and Indian. Our neighbours were Indian, the Perumals. Beyond them lived a Coloured family, the Petersens. At the corner of our road there was a white family, the Fergusons.’
‘What year was this, Gogo?’
‘From the day I was born in 1940 and through all my teenage years. From when I opened my eyes until those sad days of forced removals.’
Gogo takes a moment to recollect herself. She wipes away a tear. ‘When those bulldozers came, they demolished houses, shacks,
