15

HOLY JOE ROW

‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN, THE PLACE ISN’T EVEN ON THE MAP?’ In distant Geneva over his late-night cognac and cigar, Dr Qaphela waYozi looked up from the schedule for dismantling the slum that had become an embarrassment to the government. If Ossewa didn’t get a move on, the liberal press would be onto them like piranhas.

‘As a populated area. It’s still registered agricultural, Minister.’

‘Why?’ His hoarse bark was the result of an all-day wrangle with first-world delegates at the International Monetary Fund meeting, who tended to overlook African issues.

‘I’m not sure, Minister. I’ll find out.’

‘You do that. And I want the explanation on my desk by nine a.m. sharp.’

The secretary rose with the resigned deference of a seasoned lackey, leaving Dr waYozi gazing out over the darkly gleaming lake beyond the picture windows. On the high peaks, patches of snow glowed an eerie blue in the moonlight. The thought running through both their minds was identical: Switzerland was a pleasant change. The secretary added a resentful coda – the price of that fat cat’s cognac would feed his family for a week.

According to the sleepy informant whom he woke at two in the morning with a long-distance call to South Africa, the explanation was simple. Crocodile Flats had been overlooked during the early years of apartheid because it was omitted from the first Nationalist census.

‘Why?’

‘They only found out years later …’

One hot evening a tired census official had driven to what appeared on his map as a farming village, planning to drop off a batch of forms at the police station. The konstabels would distribute them in the morning and make sure they were filled in. He had been drinking coffee from a thermos all day and stopped to have a pee just before the village, at a bridge over a dry river bed. As he opened the Buick door, he was assailed by sounds that have chilled white hearts down the centuries in Africa. The night air pulsated with menace. Running feet thumped the earth, fighting sticks thundered on cow-hide shields, drums hammered in the darkness. The natives were rising.

He dropped to the ground and leopard-crawled towards the bridge parapet, oblivious of the grazing on elbows and knees unprotected by his safari suit. On the river bed below, spectral figures yelled war cries as they attacked each other with assegais, locked in ferocious battle. This must be the predicted night of the long knives! In a panic he fled back to the city with his forgotten census forms fluttering out the open car windows.

The boys daubed with white clay, who were stick-fighting and mock-charging each other as part of their initiation rites, never saw him. The few who picked up the fluttering forms used them as toilet paper, an unheard-of luxury at initiation camps. So the Census Board remained in ignorance and the settlement accumulating round Crocodile Flats festered in obscurity, protected from nosy officialdom by its agricultural status, strategic bribes and a ridge of low koppies, which meant it could not be seen from the new main road.

On the night of the first signs, the lambent moon shone down with impartial splendour on hovels as well as the better part of the village where the God business was concentrated.

Holy Joe Row was a gravel lane at right angles to the tarmac road, where houses had been built in the thirties by Swart Barend van der Linde’s short-sighted father, who used good bricks but did not notice his plasterers skimping on cement. The basically sound, if ever-flaking, buildings had been snapped up by the incoming clergy.

The Little Sisters of Extreme Destitution had prime position in the ex-garage on the corner. Pastor Nazaret Harmse ran a branch pastorie ministering to his Strictly Transformed congregation in the house next door, spending the night in its austere bedroom when it was too late to drive back to the central pastorie in town. His wife Tinkie joined him when she could tear herself away from her activities as a cake icing doyenne: agricultural show competitions and demos of the fancy tiered wedding cake, her speciality, to aspiring artistes.

Across the way the original Church of England mission, its excellent school having been closed down in the fifties, had dwindled to a dispirited rectory where the Reverend Ambrose Dauncey and his wife lived in borderline poverty on his miserly stipend. Una Dauncey, benign as a large moth with her prominent brown eyes and furry cheeks, did good works, which included a sewing circle and dance expression classes for underprivileged girls. Unsure what they were supposed to be expressing, they still enjoyed dancing about to Chopin and Johnny Clegg on the gramophone.

Also in the lane were a Quaker meeting house and the Salvation Army hostel established in the old mission school. The Muslim Poor Relief volunteers worked from a mobile soup kitchen that parked in front of the hostel twice a week. The Black Sash had an office in the back yard of a Jewish charitable trust for adult education. A Scandinavian benefactor with a mordant sense of irony had bought the large corner house opposite the nuns for the Marie Stopes clinic where Dr Ulrich dispensed free condoms and birth-control pills between injections, worm medicine, rehydration mixtures, abortions and insults.

The lane dwindled towards the football ground at the far end where the Zionists sang their hymns on Sunday mornings so as not to interfere with afternoon matches. Beyond the football ground rose the line of low koppies that had concealed Crocodile Flats for decades from the main road to the east, now upgraded to a four-lane highway. On the middle koppie was the holy rock said to bear the imprint of God’s right thumb.

Its discoverer, the Prophet Hallelujah, owned the only new building in Holy Joe Row. Rising above the ferment of godly endeavour and shack life was a Tuscan villa that stuck out like a cathedral, all columns and turrets and red-tiled rooflets. There were en suite bedrooms for each wife, entertainment areas, a vast streamlined kitchen with adjoining wine cellar, a TV room with a wall-sized flat screen, decks, nooks, patios, pools and fountains.

God had provided him with all this visible splendour as a sign of His solemn promise, the prophet declared. Faithful members of the Correct Baptised God Come Down in Africa Church would be rewarded if they followed the guidelines without fail: get formally baptised by being dunked, observe God’s festivals, listen to His prophet, and pay their tithes, which would make their church powerful and their village glorious …

Which is just what happened as events unfolded. God keeps His promises, the prophet proclaimed in years to come. See? Proof positive.

Dr Qaphela waYozi would later also claim a part in the miracle of Crocodile Flats. ‘In fact, I initiated the planning at the IMF meeting in Geneva, before anyone heard of the vision,’ he’d say with the flawless smile that looked so good on election posters.

But it all began with Sweetness Moloi.

Some time after midnight and well before dawn, Sweetness woke shivering from her lovely dream to the reality of a thin mattress and no blanket. Her brother had wrapped it round himself, as usual. Moving with stealth so as not to wake him, she pulled half of it back and lay there rubbing her arms as she tried to get warm again.

Was this all her life would ever amount to? Her father was gone and Gogo was old and could die soon, cancelling her pension which kept them going when Mr Eddie forgot to pay.

Only during her brief hours at school could Sweetness forget their troubles in the joy of learning. Most of the teachers worked hard to explain things, despite their tiredness towards the end of the afternoon session. The classrooms were crowded with two and three to a desk, but the walls had bright posters and the nuns and volunteers filled in, bringing different voices and ideas. Geography was her favourite subject, then English because of the books she could borrow from the library shelf. There were only twelve, dog-eared and falling apart, and she was reading them for the second time.

In the books she learnt about girls who slept in their own bedrooms and had parties with friends and travelled to other places in the aeroplanes she sometimes saw sliding high up through the sky. Why did some people have so much and her family have so little? It was a constant puzzle.