NIQ MHLONGO
Dog Eat Dog
KWELA BOOKS
To Lily Morobane
for giving me all the support that I needed.
One
Dear Mr Njomane,
The University of the Witwatersrand Bursary Committee acknowledges that it has received your application for a bursary dated the 4th of March. We regret to inform you that your application was unsuccessful. We have looked carefully at your application letter and based our decision on the information that you have supplied. Unfortunately you did not meet the criteria set by this committee.
We wish you every success in your future academic endeavours.
Kind regards
Dr Jane Winterburn
Chairperson and registrar:
University of the Witwatersrand Bursary Committee
I received that curt, insensitive letter on the warm evening of the 13th of March 1994. I had just eaten my dinner at the YMCA in Braamfontein. The Y, as we affectionately called it, had offered me temporary accommodation for about a month now, while I tried to sort out my disagreement with the University Bursary Committee.
I got up off my bed and opened the drawer where I had put my other two “we regret” letters. As if to make sure of their meaning, I unfolded each one and read it again. The wording was the same except for the dates. Did anybody even read my applications? I wondered angrily. I thought I had supplied everything that the Bursary Committee needed: copies of my father’s death certificate and my mother’s pension slip, an affidavit sworn at our local police station giving the names and ages of the nine other family members who depended on my mother’s pension, as well as three other affidavits confirming all movable and immovable property that we owned. Although, unfortunately, my family did not own any immovable property as the house in Soweto that we had been living in since 1963 was leased to us by the apartheid government for a period of 99 years. What more information do these people want about the poverty that my family is living in? I asked myself.
Anger smouldered inside me as I read the letter again. Why did the committee have to be so polite in dismissing my application? They should have told me plainly, “We regret to inform you that you are black, stupid and poor; therefore we cannot waste our money on your thick Bantu skull.” I could have swallowed the words if they were simple and direct.
Now the thought of being forced to part with the cheese life of the Y because of this letter from the Bursary Committee was like a curse. It was as cruel as a man who chops off the breasts of the mother as the hungry baby tries to suck the fresh milk from them.
Did this mean I would be forced to hook up again with those hopeless drunken friends of mine? Was I going back to that life of wolf-whistling the ladies who passed by in the street, calling them izifebe (bitches) if they did not respond the way we liked? I felt like I was being pushed back into a gorge filled with hungry crocodiles.
There was nothing exciting for me about living the life of the unemployed and unemployable, whose days in the township fold without hope. I thought I had said goodbye to cleaning the dog shit out of our small garden. I didn’t want to go back to waking up early every Tuesday morning to stand outside with the rubbish bag in my hands, waiting for the garbage truck. I was completely bored of watching the predictable soapies on my brother’s television set just to kill the slow-moving time. I was tired of my uneventful township life as a whole.
That month that I had been allowed to stay at the Y I had tasted the cheese life. I had my own room, and although I was sharing it with my newly acquired friend Dworkin at least I enjoyed some privacy, unlike at home in our four-roomed Soweto house.
At home I still slept in the sitting-dining room although I was twenty years old. Yes, at home I was woken up at four o’clock in the morning by the footsteps of my two brothers on their way to the kitchen to boil water before they went to work.
I was happy at the Y. I had almost forgotten the smell of sewage that filled the air at home each time the chain jammed in the cistern of our small toilet, which was outside in the right-hand corner of our 25-square-metre yard. I was enjoying the luxury of using the soft and freely supplied toilet paper; the skill of softening pages from a telephone directory when answering the call of nature in the township was no longer necessary.
At the Y I could differentiate between my meals. I didn’t have to queue in our local shop to buy those oily, constipating fatcakes every morning. I was fed with cornflakes, bacon and eggs and Jungle Oats. I no longer walked the streets of the township to find funerals at which to get my weekend lunches. I no longer had to short-change my aunt by buying a fifteen rand piece of meat at our local butcher each time she sent me out with a twenty rand note; there was no need for that kind of pocket money anymore.
To suspend the pain and frustration that was sharpening inside me I inserted a Peter Gabriel cassette into my tape recorder, and the song “Don’t Give Up” started bellowing from the speakers.
Don’t give up
’Cos you have friends
Don’t give up
You’re not beaten yet
The lyrics reminded me of how my father used to encourage me when I ran out of faith. My old man would tell me that to keep on trying would never kill a man. That was the sort of advice that I needed, as I looked deep into my mind for the solution to my problem. I was never going to give up trying.
Two
On Monday morning I stormed into the Financial Aid Office at the East Campus Senate House. I just couldn’t understand why I could not be granted some kind of financial assistance. The government was pumping large sums of money into the universities for needy black students like myself. I deserved that money.
I had already made up my mind about what I was going to say to the secretary. I was going to tell her that I wanted to have a word with Jane. Jane was the first name of Dr Winterburn, who wrote me those three insensitive letters. I didn’t know her and I had never spoken to her before. I did not even know where her office was. All I knew was that if you want to get past a stubborn secretary to have a word with their lazy boss, you need to use the boss’s first name. That is the only way, to make them to think that you know their boss from somewhere or that you are in some way related to them. Otherwise the secretary will tell you that the boss is unavailable, or in some endless meeting. They will dismiss you even if the boss is available, but doesn’t want to be disturbed while surfing the Internet for child pornography.
I marched towards the counter, avoiding the three-metre-long queue. I had already told myself that I was not going to stand in that queue. Enough was enough. I had spent too long dusting those benches with my arse while waiting in vain for that bursary. I had nothing to lose. The decision not to grant me financial assistance had already been taken. I will show them today, I said to myself as I reached the counter.
As I expected, I was immediately subjected to a barrage of insults from a coloured secretary with a narrow forehead. She made sure that everyone inside the office could hear her.
“Shoo! You know I thought they lie. But they were right to say that if you want to
