TO STRENGTHEN MY legend I began to make regular trips to the local township. It lay beyond Helderstroom to the south of the town in a valley even lower than the town, which meant that a haze of coal smoke hung over it more or less permanently. At a glance, one might be forgiven for thinking that it was an early morning mist lifting off the fields, but at close quarters in truth it was a dispiriting place. There was nothing romantic about it. There was no order to the township other than a rudimentary main street with a general supply store and the local bottle-store which doubled as a tavern. Beside this, it was a sprawling collection of the ubiquitous red-brick, one-roomed houses to be found in all such townships, and additional accommodation as the number of inhabitants grew, in corrugated-iron structures. In some of the yards additional structures, made from daub and sapling, had been constructed. Roofs were sheets of corrugated-iron in various states of rust, weighted down against the fierce gusting wind that periodically swept the area by pumpkins or slabs of concrete.
The rest of the settlement sprawled through the dip and up a nearby slope. Structures pressed close together, with nothing but mud tracks running between. Here and there rainwater pooled. I noticed that the community collected their drinking water in large plastic containers from stand-pipes in some of the streets. There was no electricity in the township. In each home, coal stoves burned day and night and the air was thick with the fug of smoke and the scent of tar.
The first time I visited the tavern it was to let it be known that I was a new man about town. The people were a poor, threadbare lot, and they all had a grey pallor to their faces. Most of them were or had been farm labourers. A few wore the overalls of the large agricultural co-operatives in the region, others a miscellany of patched trousers, dresses and T-shirts. I felt over dressed and resolved that next time I came I would wear something more appropriate. The people spoke colloquial Zulu and I was at pains to drop my urban accent and vocabulary, resorting to a taciturn, monosyllabic demeanour until I had a better feel for the rural lore.
Over quarts of Carling Black Label and roll-ups of pungent Boxer tobacco, the talk was mostly of inconsequential things: what had happened in the fields that day, a bus that had crashed on the highway, then detailed speculation about the number of casualties, each speaker claiming authenticity for what they had seen and heard. This particular discussion got quite heated. Then someone broke into the clamour with some local gossip – a church elder who had been caught with a neighbour’s wife.
I, too, kept my talk small – how I had come from Johannesburg to work for Rachel and a few sparse details of the ornithology project. People seemed puzzled that someone might show such an interest in birds, beyond killing them with rubber sling-shots so that they stayed away from their meagre mielie and wheat crops. Many of them had seen Rachel in the fields with her binoculars and notebooks and by now they regarded her with bemused affection. She was friendly for a white person, they said, and always greeted them if she encountered them in the fields. I presented her as the usual white madam, paternalistic but demanding in what she had me do.
If I expected to encounter any discussion about politics in the tavern, there was none. In the desultory conversation that characterised the place, I sensed a people who were worn out, who were merely existing. Should the subject of the police arise in passing in a conversation, there was a dark muttering in the crowd, but no more than that.
One evening in the tavern I met Jacob. I marked him as urban by his clothing and in fact he was a high school student from Soweto, about eighteen years old, who was visiting his maternal grandmother on her sixtieth birthday. It was an occasion for celebration. An ox was to be slaughtered and the women of her village just beyond the turn-off to the highway had been brewing drums of sorghum beer for several weeks already. I pulled him aside and asked him in a low tone why the people of the township appeared so unengaged by politics.
“So you’ve noticed,” he said. He went on to tell me that the people of Helderstroom township were a rootless lot. Many were evictees from the surrounding farms. There was little sense of community among them, no binding common ancestry. Everyone competed for the same small pool of jobs in the town. The tavern was full of impimpis, informers who would report on you if you expressed any political views.
Rachel’s and my instructions were to document what was happening in the area as well as to note any resistance to it. And so we documented the stories we heard of evictions and during our regular excursions we took photographs of the fall-out: the destroyed wattle and daub homesteads, the up-ended headstones in the communal graveyards, the wells filled in with rubble, the skeletal remains of goats and cattle and the burnt out maize crops of the small farmers, who had fed themselves and their families through gardens started by their ancestors over a century before.
The information we gathered was intended chiefly for an audience abroad. It was published under pseudonyms in newspapers in Europe and the US, with the anti-apartheid movement putting pressure on the South African government to desist and urging companies with investment in the country to intervene and help stop the forced removals. My role in this was restricted to translating from Zulu the testimony that Rachel typed up in the evening, usually with a whisky at her elbow and Coltrane in the background. I would hide the transcripts in The Eyrie, high up on the wall in the living room in a crevice my fingers located behind a picture rail, until Rachel was ready for them. How they and the photographs reached Europe was something I was not privy to. There was a priest from Johannesburg who came to the house sporadically and he and Rachel would have tea under a pergola in the pear orchard, where she had set up an old garden table and a couple of uncomfortable wire-backed chairs that had long since lost their cushions. When he visited I hung back. I had been well trained in the strategy of “need to know”.
Once a month we would take a drive further afield to one of the larger towns in the area, which had a better stocked grocery store than the one in Helderstroom. Here Rachel engaged over the counter with the Indian shopkeeper, while I took our list of supplies and went up and down the few aisles. On one of these occasions, when I was getting down on my knees to pick up a packet of fallen sugar, and without at first realising what I was seeing, through a gap in the shelves I saw Rachel hand over an A4 manila envelope. I cursed myself for having stumbled on this scene. I assumed that it was through these and perhaps other channels that Rachel was communicating the details of our work and our gradually unfolding strategy to her handler in Swaziland, and that this was how she was receiving instructions in turn. But in the beginning it was not something we talked to each other about.