the road towards the policeman. He was close now, level with the car. Chapi lowered his gun, asked if he was okay. Jabu slurred a reply. Simultaneously, he drew his pistol and shot Chapi high in the body on the right. Chapi fell to a crouch and lifted his gun. Jabu squeezed the trigger again. It jammed. Chapi levelled his weapon. Jabu cursed, dived over the Ford’s bonnet, trying to fix the gun. Chapi was firing now, six shots or more. At each explosion Jabu expected the shock of metal tearing into his flesh. He scrambled to the front of the car as the wounded Chapi moved to the rear: the hunter suddenly become the hunted. It was true what they said about Chapi: he couldn’t be killed. The shots were deafeningly close. This is it, thought Jabu, the end. And then silence. He raced wildly down the street. Alive. Once round the corner, he walked slowly up the street behind Chapi’s house and, jumping a fence, hid in a garden.
He pushed the gun into his pants. To think that such a small weapon could take the life of a man, although the indestructible Chapi would surely survive only one bullet. And then the police would hunt him down. Yet Jabu couldn’t move. The night was filled with sirens as police vans accelerated from Moroka police station. Anyone on the streets would be stopped and questioned. He wouldn’t stand a chance. He knew that no one would leave their houses. The brave might peep out a window, but no one would go further than that. This was Soweto and what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. An hour passed. Another. Until early in the morning, cold and scared, he was finally able to creep away.
The next day Jabu made preparations to get out of the country. His passport had expired. He would have to jump the border. This presented dangers of its own. Another possibility of arrest. To add to his anxiety he still knew nothing of Chapi, of whether his mission had been successful.
Jabu decided to cross the border into Botswana as he had been instructed to do if something went wrong. Mozambique was out of the question as it would be an embarrassment to the Mozambicans if he were caught.
At Johannesburg’s Park Station that afternoon, the Sowetan’s billboards proclaimed the death of Chapi. Jabu bought a copy. He read that the residents of Soweto had ‘danced in the streets’.
That night he slipped through the fence into Botswana and made his way to a refugee centre. Refusing to speak to anyone at the camp, he demanded to see a senior ANC official. Two days later he received a visit from Joe Modise, to whom he told his story.
Afterwards, exhausted, aware of the finality of his act, he wondered why he felt no regret, why he was infused with a sense of victory.
His first mission was over. He had committed murder.
3
Getting to Pretoria Central Maximum Security Prison takes you through the massive military complex of Voortrekkerhoogte, the headquarters of the South African Defence Force. Army camps lie on the right and left, uniform brown barracks matching the dry, brown veld. The largest military complex in Africa. This is an ugly place. Behind the grey walls of the camps lies an alien terrain of numbing rules and soldiers, sad people who find comfort in the camaraderie of procedure and the invigoration that the distant prospect of death brings. I know, I have been there. Very often, I see the air force’s C130s taking off: dark olive green birds with bulging stomachs of bile, heading for Angola, Mozambique, Namibia (still called South West Africa at the time) to fuel dubious and unpublicised wars. These conflicts in the north, on which we quickly turn the page, are never real until someone we know does not come back. And most of us know someone.
I have to admit that I am prejudiced against Pretoria. I have never been able to distinguish the pretty purple of the jacaranda trees that line every avenue from the suffering that is planned and implemented from this city. I have been involved in too many trials and made far too many visits to a prison that smothers all within it for me to appreciate the jacarandas in blossom. There is little beauty in Pretoria. The city streets are always filled with bureaucrats, police or soldiers scurrying between great concrete blocks – the massive government departments that administer the country – the heat rising from the tarred roads in the city centre visible and choking.
Another reason I dislike Pretoria is because bombs go off there. The ANC’s military struggle, focused originally on ‘hard targets’ like military and security installations, has intensified over the past few years. Greater numbers of units come into the country and the line between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ targets has blurred. I suspect that Pretoria is regarded as a hard target and the ANC doesn’t know or care if I am visiting. The thought of leaving this world in pieces along with people I dislike is not only sickening, it scares me. A lot.
Even restaurants are targeted. I don’t particularly like Wimpy Bars, but now they’re being blown up, and hamburger-eating civilians are dying. This bizarre choice of target makes me wonder about the mind of the bomber and fills me with unease and fear, for both the burger and the bomb. The lines are hazy out there. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time can get you killed.
The prison is squat and square, the interior courtyards surrounded by high yellow walls and steel walkways. Successive, impenetrable steel doors lead through the sections into the depths. The outer section facing the street houses the common criminals. One of the busiest roads in the country goes right past the white windows of the biggest prison in the country. Passing by, you see hands waving imploringly at you. It’s uncomfortable. Disconcerting. Not the best entrance to our capital city, but then Pretoria is a city without manners. From the monolith of the Voortrekker Monument, visible from twenty kilometres away, to the rifle design of the University of South Africa that looms above the road into the city, and the clammy embrace of the massive prison, you get the message, and the message is a crude one: power.
I drive down Potgieter Street, turn onto the bridge and suddenly I’m in the ‘secure’ complex. To my left, the officers’ club and other headquarter buildings. Left, and left again, and I’m facing the neat and ordered houses of the prison warders. No shortage of gardeners for their green lawns and clipped hedges. Serious criminals serving out their last days at Pretoria Central manicure these pathways. They know that cutting blades of grass, even one at a time, in the sun with soil beneath your feet, cannot compare to the concrete vacuum of the prison.
I feel the trim lawns and pathways of the houses, made more clinical by the scarcity of flowers, mirror the minds of the occupants. Their stoeps gleam, red, polished. Children play and laugh on the grass, while sprinklers lazily loop a glittering silver spray over the austerity. The lace curtains at the windows hang in the stillness. These houses are all the same, the difference lies in the gardens, the cars and the cut of the hedges, but all is dwarfed by the great yellow-brick prison towering above them. In that shadow, the complex seems invulnerable.
On the hill above the prison squats Death Row, a separate prison for those sentenced to death. It is where the hangings occur, a frequent occurrence in these times. I have never been there.
The cheap facebrick of the prison, almost white in the sun, contrasts with the bottle-green bullet-proof glass of the protruding observation posts. I see movement behind the glass as I squint up at the tower: the boy at the gates of the castle waiting to be let in. Two cameras swivel in an arc and I know that the warders are watching me. The game begins.
I don’t get angry, because there are rules to this game. They set them and I obey them, but they also know that they can’t go too far. Even if we both misbehave, we respect the boundaries and act within them. If they go too far, I will report them and someone senior may act on my complaints. It’s the least you can do when you hold all the cards. So they are rude and I am, I hope, contemptuously professional.
I press the intercom button. No answer. If someone were to respond immediately, I would be surprised. I wait for two minutes and press again. Wait some more and press again. Third time lucky. I know we are close to the limit now. A response
