carry it to the edge of the lawn where you shake it off into the rubbish heap.
You are used to creatures that kill with one bite, sting, suck, or zap. Your five-year-old niece nearly died of a paralysis tick bite in North Queensland. The Australian bush is dripping with brown snakes, black snakes, tiger snakes and taipans (to name a few of the more deadly species). But here in Africa you don’t know the bad guys from the good guys yet.
And then there is the gecko that clings to the ceiling of the bedroom all night catching mosquitoes and making kissing noises every time you try to drift off to sleep. In the morning it occupies the bathroom while you shower. It follows your every movement, watches you take a crap, and cocks its head at the clanking of the toilet roll against the wall.
Lizards drop their tails as decoys to allow them to get away from predators. All lizards have detachable tails. Which is why humans need tales too, to trail along behind them, to give them balance. And what are tales for? The analogy swishes its way through the jungle. Detachable tails are for self-preservation, to distract predators and entertain unwelcome visitors. Leave them wagging like tongues so that the teller of the tale can escape. But beware the tales that do not detach. Scorpion tails have a sting at the end. Cockroaches, on the other feeler, have no tales to tell, so to speak.
Sizwe Bantu, ‘The Tale of the African Lizard’ from Ubuntu! Vol. IX, pp. 23-24.
There are the insects: long-legged spiky hexapoda, shiny black monster centipedes, a freeway of ants, each the size of your thumb, beetles sporting rhino horns. Spiders—again you are used to huntsmen and funnelwebs—but here monsters lurk in every corner, black widows under the kitchen counter and the chairs, and aliens with swollen abdomens, their backs crawling with a million baby spiders—the stuff nightmares are made of.1
1 Superstitions have given rise to many myths about cockroaches; for example, the myth of the dreaded African kissing bugs. One bite will make you itch forever, and not an ordinary itch, but a sexual itch that drives you mad with desire, and leaves you unable to ever satisfy your lust.
You pour your cereal into a bowl of preserved milk and out scramble five live cockroaches. They swim valiantly in the milk to reach the sides.
‘Bloody hell.’ You scoop them out, contemplate eating the cereal, but decide against it and pour the mixture into the flowerbed outside. The packet is crawling with cockroaches, so you dump that too.
Cockroaches have made themselves at home in all your packets, even chewing the cardboard that holds the cereal. Three large Oriental/ African cockroaches scurry away as you open the pantry door. You find the nearest weapon—a tea towel this time—and whack them to death. One escapes, crippled, a serrated leg left behind in the sugar bowl, but you smash it with your shoe as it tries to squeeze into a crack in the floorboards.
Your love of the cockroach is only theoretical, symbolic, literary. You wonder about Bantu’s obsession with these pests: is his fascination with the Periplaneta, Blaberus and Blatella species also only theoretical, or does he keep them as pets, revere them as tiny gods of the oppressed? Does he study their behaviour to get inspiration for his material?
It is time for work. In spite of the cold shower, you are already sweating. You have to dunk your head under the tap before donning the suit.
Surely this is madness? How soon will you be able to shed this skin? But the suit, you have to remind yourself, is the uniform of the supercilious sneerers. And you are now one of them. Funny that. You go to university, ranting and radicalising, not realising you are one of the elite, and then you finally capitulate and take your place as oppressor of yourself.
But if you look smart, the rental car looks a right mess. It is wet with dew. Mud has splashed up the doors and bumpers and caked dry; road dirt has sprayed up onto the windscreen and roof; and the tyres look a little depressed, if not entirely miserable. The exhaust makes a farting noise if you rev it too high.
You arrive on campus at seven thirty. No armed gangs of thugs or ambushes intercept you this time, but just past the Mazisi Kunene turnpike, an impi of Zulu warriors wheels onto the verge of the freeway ahead of you and marches in squadrons of four abreast along the verge. They are singing some war song, their bare chests glistening in the sun, spears whacking their shields in time to the beat. Cowhide shields, knobkerries, spears, the lot. Is there a war on you don’t know about? Or a remake of the movie Shaka Zulu you have stumbled into? But other cars whiz by unperturbed, so you do the same.
Even this early in the morning, the university is rivuleted with students in jeans, joggers and sandals, t-shirts with corporate logos, and backpacks. You squeeze past giggling triplets of women, heavy phalanxes of men; you listen to loud conversations held on mobile phones by students staring through you at electronic friends. Students slouch in the shade, or drape themselves onto benches, or brush past you, engaged in fervent dialogues about important matters. You understand nothing of the clicking, musical language. What good was that iZulu language course you took on the plane on the way over here?
Sawubona! Wena unjani? Ngi khona.
The Honours classroom is an octagonal over-air-conditioned room with no windows. Ten pairs of eyes follow you across the room and watch you dump Modern South African Literature on the podium. Seven women, three men: the student elite of the university.
None of these students has textbooks. You have been warned.
The women sit in the first three rows, cushioned in groups of solidarity. The men, as men do, sit in the dark of the back row, arms folded. One places his runners on the desk in front of him. Another wears his cap backwards on his head. Another in gang-baggy pants holds a phone to his ear.
Your attention is focused on the female student in the front row. Her thick blonde dreadlocks hang halfway down her back, tangled with beads and shells. She wears a black bowler hat at an angle, and her pale green eyes are bright in contrast to her dark skin. She’s like a creature from the deep who’s been washed and tumbled into existence by a briny sea. The way she stares at you, and the way others look at her, tell you that she is used to being the centre of male admiration and attention. Here is another person who speaks to the world with her body and not her words.
Do you need to casually mention the AK-47 propped up against the cupboard in the corner? And … is this a panga you see before you, lying on the front desk, stained with dried blood?
As your eyes adjust, you see them—the three hijackers in the back row. Kaliban. The AK man slouched in the front row, his feet up on the desk; next to him, the man with the scar.
Should you call security?
Should you make a leap for the AK?
Or should you simply clutch the podium tightly and swallow hard, staring in turn at the panga then the AK then the students, grinning like an idiot?
‘You remember us?’
‘Joel.’
‘Kaliban—with a K.’
‘His real name however is Caesar Langa.’
The nightmare resurrected. Panga man, Scarface and AK man. You swallow.
‘The New Strugglers.’
You open the folder and run your finger down the student list. Sure enough, here they
