fascination for these armies of determined creatures, who by their suicidal insistence claimed residence here. Over supper (Bunny Chow bought from The Star of India downstairs), he found himself staring at a particularly large dead cockroach on his dining room table. Its jagged legs, its oval shape, the light reflecting purple and orange off its back spoke to him. I am black, but comely, it said. Behold, I also am formed out of the clay. He was particularly intrigued by the black marking on its head, a third eye watching him from another dimension.
He was suddenly ashamed. The Modern Afrikanist was an artist: he prided himself on an aesthetic appreciation of the world: so why should he exclude cockroaches from his artistic apprehension of the universe? They had value. They had form. They had beauty.
So instead of brushing away the dead cockroach in disgust, he set up easel and paints on the table and painted its portrait, with garish Fauvist colours, and generous gobs of paint, smeared on with the gusto and urgency of Van Gogh.
Pleased with his evening’s work, he hung the picture on the living room wall. The next day, after breakfast, he shaped in black modelling clay a giant Rodin representation of the dead creature. And as he was loath to throw away the cockroach corpse, he varnished it with lacquer, and set it on the mantelpiece under his painting.
From here on, he no longer swept away dead cockroaches, but collected and sorted them according to size, texture, colour, and death-posture. He pasted the tiny ones onto a canvas and painted them —bright blue, orange and green—into a landscape, and hung the work of art on the wall in his kitchen. Monet would be impressed: up close, the painting was a knobbly packed death trench of cockroaches; from a distance, it was the North KwaZulu coast line, with sweeping, wavy cane fields, complete with workers dotted in the stalks, and smoke rising in the distance where old cane fields were being burned.
He glued the large cockroaches along the rim of his bookcase to make a pleasing pattern of ridges and bumps, taking care with the feelers so they would form a pattern of aerial lightness.
As more and more cockroaches died, he created more works of art. In a few short weeks, his furniture was covered with varnished cockroach designs, seven magnificent paintings hung on his walls, and a trinity of three large statues sat on his tables in raw clay, an essential gesture of cockroach emerging out of the formlessness of his previous prejudices. Soon there were no more walls to use: he covered his lampshade with cockroach designs; he made a sofa cover from the smooth corpses of cockroaches; he covered his desk with the oval pattern; he pasted them all over the bookcase. He now loved cockroaches—their form, their slender shape, their nestling together. A dozen new projects spun from his mind onto paper in the middle of the night—a cockroach-paste sculpture, a cockroach doorway, a cockroach carpet, a cockroach Azanian flag.
Ironically, as the months passed, he ran out of cockroaches. Either there were no more in the dark spaces behind the walls of his flat, or they had got wind of his intentions, and had migrated to better homelands, where there was more to eat, and where macabre, varnished corpses of their brothers and sisters did not stare at them from walls and bookshelves and headboards.
But the Modern Afrikanist was still bubbling with inspiration; and so he went out in search of raw material. He scoured the rubbish containers at the end of the street and collected roaches in plastic bags lined with white powder. He frequented the back end of The Star of India restaurant, the stench of a make-shift toilet behind the shish-kebab stall on the corner, and the stair wells of his apartment building. He arrived home every evening with his bag full, sorted them out by shape and breed (Asian, Smoky-Brown, Parktown-Prawn black), glued broken feelers on the big ones, repaired broken wings, legs, and carapaces, then set to work.
The paintings were beautiful: here is one of the Indian Ocean he couldn’t quite see from the kitchen window, clear skies, zero humidity, the brown smog that skulked over Durban vanquished; here’s another of the street below, devoid of prostitutes and taxis and street gangs, replaced by a post-Apartheid rainbow community of people; and here is a self-portrait of a clear-faced, hopeful Modern Afrikanist, looking out onto the horizon of the Afrikan Renaissance. Each painting breathed hope into the world.
The heat is hellish.
The car is protesting as you drive onto campus. Its needle strains way into the red, its fan whines, its engine stutters.
And you’re late.
You follow Alice-in-Wonderland signs that coax you around roundabouts to Building D: HUMANITIES. The English Department is on the second floor.
You park in an empty lot, adjust your tie, gather your belongings and walk smartly towards Building D. You hunt first for a toilet. You need to rearrange yourself, compose yourself, straighten the crumpled suit, splash the fear off your face.
Here’s one on the first floor. GENTLEMEN: STAFF ONLY. But the sign has been mutilated with a knife, and a palimpsest has been scrawled over it in black pen: THE DOORS OF ABLUTION BLOCKS SHALL BE OPEN TO ALL.
You hunt in vain for a mirror but find instead four screw holes on the wall and a dark patch where a mirror has been removed. The water from the cold tap comes out scalding hot, and the hot water tap produces cold water.
The sweat has dried on you to a lacquer finish, a thin varnish of fear glazed onto your soul.
Your body always betrays you. Every time. But stick it in a suit and tie, itchy grey socks and black leather shoes, crisp shirt and collar, and you can disguise its animal nature well enough.
The long English Department corridor smells of smoke and burnt rubber. Half way down the passage, you pass a gutted office—and stop to peer in through a dark black hole where the door has been beaten in with an axe. The gold plaque on the door, blackened but still legible, reads DR THAMI MPOFU, ENGLISH.
You take out the printed copy of the email you have folded tightly in your pocket and squint at it in the bad light.
Hi Timothy
Shall we say, ten am on the 15th? Let’s meet in my office.
Building D, second floor, left along D corridor.
You can’t miss it.
Thami Mpofu.
Yellow tape criss-crosses the yawning cavity, and inside, the entire office is burnt out. What were once plastic blinds on the windows are now curled molten blobs of black dripping down the wall onto what was once a desk. Empty bookshelves stand charred against the wall. Just your luck. Come all this way and the guy’s been burnt to death in his own office. You walk past many shut doors, heavy oak stout doors with sombre signs labelling them as Professor, Doctor, Lecturer, Adjunct Temporary Tutor and so on. At the far end of the corridor, you spot the door you have been looking for: Professor J. Zimmerlie, Acting Chair.
In any other universe, you would wonder what the hell an ‘Acting Chair’ is.
You get the impression that they are watching you on CCTV, though you have seen no cameras, for even before you knock, the door opens.
‘Professor Zimmerlie. Dr Turner is it? Glad you made it.’ The man offers a limp yellow hand for you to shake.
The umlungu is dressed in a tight dark suit, white shirt, tie, cufflinks, shiny leather shoes. He is the whitest man you have ever seen. And you mean that literally. He is so white, he looks
