white male protestant heterosexual corpse.
This is the point where you should wake up, sweating, heart racing, thinking—whew—it was only a dream. And what a nightmare.
The man swings the AK to point through the green jungle to a red flash of roof, a metal aerial glinting in the sun. ‘Through there.’
Caliban—Kaliban—grins into the front window and bangs on the roof. ‘Thanks. Thanks, man, for the ride. Nice wheels. Nice wheels.’
You steel yourself for the climax, the confrontation, but when you open your eyes, they are plunging into the green foliage, following a thin red path. Then they are gone.
The world stops for a second; even the cicadas stop screaming.
As soon as you can stop your leg from shaking, you drive on, wary of a trick, a trap, ready for the clatter of bullets in your skull.
But no.
Ahead, as you round the corner, you see red and white boom gates, a guard house, three men in green uniforms lolling in the shade. But it is no mirage. You take three deep breaths, pry your sticky hands off the steering wheel, slow your heart. Look down the path that has swallowed them up, and up again at the banner.
‘The University of eSikamanga’, announces a sign arching over the road in English and Afrikaans, the language of the former oppressor. Universiteit van eSikamanga.
From the point of view of da cockroach, all languages are da languages of the Oppressor.
— Sizwe Bantu, Seven Invisible Selves, 2008
You drive under the arch, and your car putters to the booms. Your heart is still pounding way too loud and fast but your mind is numb, as if you have indeed been murdered and are on the other side, your ghostly self still insisting you have a body, and you are driving an imaginary car to a spirit university entrance.
A security guard leaps out into the road. He looks real enough. ‘Whoa, whoa!’ Another walks in front of the booms, holding a clipboard, his peaked cap low in the glaring sun. He bangs the bonnet with an all-too-real fist. ‘Stop! Stop, wena.’
You stop.
You eye the man’s pistol tucked away in his pocket.
You speak. The words, surprisingly, come out as words that you can, and he can, hear. ‘Th … th … those men … ?’
The guard pokes his cap into the front window. ‘They think I don’t see … ? I saw them! I saw them!’
2 Skabenga: South African (n). Slang. Rascal, scallywag.
3 Tsotsi: South African (n). Slang. Thug, dodgy character (from Nguni tsotsa: flashy dresser).
Guard number two holds out his clipboard. ‘We try not to encourage giving them lifts, Professor. Especially those ones. Skabengas.2 Tsotsis.3’
‘You … know them?’
Guard number one shakes his head, meaning yes. Guard number two clicks his tongue. ‘Troublemakers.’
‘One had an AK …’
You are not sure they understand you. A BLOODY AK, you want to shout. But perhaps that is normal around here. Perhaps everyone carries weapons in South Africa. The guards certainly do.
He hands you the clipboard. ‘Welcome to the University of eSikamanga.’
‘Cokcraco’ by Sizwe Bantu
(The Present Tense, Vol. XXV, Feb. 2002, pp. 36-40)4
4 There has been much critical speculation regarding the title of this story. Jones (2008) maintains that the anagrammic dyslexia says much about the displacement of the ‘other’, and ‘the cockroach motif has been a favorite symbol for displaced people everywhere’. Others have made much of the missing letter ‘h’, pointing to Bantu’s commentary on how dialects of English omit the ‘h’ in speech, as in “’e ’as an ’airy back”. But the most plausible, if intellectually and aesthetically unsatisfying, explanation is documented by Wesson (2010) who points out that the original manuscfuptis of Bantu shows that he is a notoriously bad typist and contstantl;y miseplles words, as if he is typing in grtea haste. See for eample his commonly misspelled ‘form’; for ;’from’. Wesson suggests tthat Bantu was simply tryig nt otype the word ‘cockroach’ and his fingers slipped on the keys, indicating that when inspiration strikes and the words pour out ,yo udo not have the dexterity to keep up. Elsewhere in his manuscripts, we see cockroach spelled ckroahc, cokroahd, and even codchroarh.
In the city of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (in the imaginary country of Azania, Afrika) a man rented an apartment near the beach, in a derelict but expensive neighbourhood behind Point Road. In Apartheid days, the area had been a whites-only area—and was still largely whites-only due to the exorbitant rents set by unscrupulous and invisible landlords. (I’m only talking of the insides of the apartments, of course: the streets were the habitat of prostitutes and street children.) The man—let me call him a Modern Afrikanist for now—who rented the flat lived alone.
The flat afforded a sea view, or so the landlord had told him. The apartment block was crowded in with other dilapidated buildings, but if he craned his neck out of the kitchen window on a clear day, he could see a blue patch of sea between the Nedbank towers and The Wheel. Taxi-drivers, prostitutes and street brawlers below made the street a noisy place at night, but once he had bolted and double-locked his front door and slammed the street-facing windows, the Modern Afrikanist would be left in silence to pursue his artistic endeavours.
5 Although Bantu here refers to the African or Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis), scholars have agreed that the cockroaches in his paintings and sculptures are more likely to be the death-head cockroach (Blaberus craniifer) because of the striking markings on the thorax.
Unfortunately, the main feature of this flat was not its privacy, nor its silence, but the scuttling of serrated legs and rasping of carapaces against the linoleum. In Durban, cockroaches grew three to four inches long.5 He would find them everywhere: when he turned on the tap, they shot out; when he made tea, he found them dead and soggy in the kettle; when he poured cereal, he found them sleeping disguised as Honey Smacks … He didn’t like squashing them—they made such a mess. Instead, he spread toxic white powder for them in the kitchen cupboards; he plugged up the taps; he sealed his food. But they kept coming. He resorted to spraying the crevices, cracks and running boards every morning before he went out. He would return at night to find piles of cockroach corpses in the bath, on the kitchen table, in the bed, and lining the skirting board to every room.
His initial
