went off the road.
'Nothing to forgive. You're giving me the best damned time of my life. You're kicking the Boers in their nuts, and that's nothing to forgive… '
The shouting died.
Over Jan's shoulder Jack saw the dark line of the edge of the township. Red and black brick walls behind a fence of rusting cattle wire. Low smudges of dull colour, nothing for the sun to brighten.
Jan had told Jack, before they had started out, that Duduza was the only place where they had the smallest chance of raising his munitions. He was too junior in the Movement to be able to contact senior men at short notice.
Part of the protective cover screen, in place to maintain the command chain's security, meant that a junior, a Jan van Niekerk, only responded to anonymous orders in his dead letter drop. Jan had said there was a Black he had once met, at a meeting in Kwa Thema township, a lively happy faced young man with a soft chocolate au lait complexion who had said his name and said where he lived, and been too relaxed and too confident to stay with the ritual of numbered code indentifications. Jan had said that the young Black's name was Henry Kenge.
They saw the block on the road into the township.
Four hundred metres ahead of them. Two Casspirs and a yellow police van.
Jan had been very definite, that he hadn't any way of promising that he would find Henry Kenge. Couldn't say whether he was one of the thousand detainees, whether he had fled the country, whether he was dead. Jan had said that trying to trace the man was the only chance he knew of getting weapons by that evening. He had told Jack that it would be many days until he was contacted through the dead letter drop. The Movement would wait with extreme caution to see whether the death of Jacob Thiroko had compromised that part of the Johannesburg structure that had known of the incursion towards Warmbaths. Jan had said that every person who had known of the incursion would be isolated for their own safety, for the safety of those who dealt with them. And they would all sit very tight for a while anyway until it was discovered how Thiroko was betrayed. Jan said he would have to be under suspicion himself, having known of the rendezvous.
The moped slowed. Not for Jack to give advice. For the boy to make his own mind. Jack's frustration that he was a stranger, without experience, unable to contribute.
The jerk off the tarmac. Jan revved all the power he could drag from the engine. They surged and bumped away across the dirt, away from the road and the police block.
Jack clung to Jan's waist.
The boy shouted, 'Carry yourself well, and for God's sake don't look scared. Scared is guilt to these people.
If you see me move, follow me. If we have to get out it'll happen fast. The mood changes, like bloody light- ning… and this is a hell of a scary place we're going into.'
Jack punched the boy in the ribs.
Away to the right there was the bellow of a loudspeaker from the police block. Jack couldn't hear the words. He thought they were beyond rifle range as they slipped the cordon.
There were holes in the fence. Jan searched for one that was wide enough for the Suzuki and jolted through it.
Jan cut the engine.
A terrible quiet around them, and then a dog barking. No people. Jan pushed his moped. Jack was close behind him.
They went forward down a wide street of beaten dirt.
Jack thought that Soweto was chic in comparison. He saw overturned and burned cars. He saw a fire-gutted house. He saw the dog, tied by string to a doorpost, angry and straining to get at them.
'Straight roads make it easier for the police and military to dominate. They haven't electricity here, the water's off street taps, but they've good straight roads for the Casspirs.'
Jack hissed, as if frightened of his own voice, 'Where the hell is everybody?'
'A funeral's the only thing that gets everyone out. They've had enough funerals here in the last eighteen months. It's a tough place, it's hot. There's not a Black policeman can live here any more, and the Black quisling councillors are gone.
Shit… '
Jan pointed. It was a small thing and without having it pointed to him Jack wouldn't have noticed. Jan was pointing to a galvanised bucket, filled with water, in front of a house.
Jack thought of it as a house but it was more of a brick and tin shack. He saw the bucket. When he looked up the street he saw there were buckets filled with water in front of each house, each shack, in the wide street.
'Means bad trouble. The water is for the kids to wash the gas out of their faces. If there's going to be trouble everybody leaves water on the street.'
'If you don't put the water out?' Jack asked.
'Then they would be thought of as collaborators and they get the necklace. Hands tied behind their backs, a tyre hung on their shoulders, that's the necklace. They set light to the tyre.'
'Bloody nice revolution you've started.'
'It's hard for these people to touch the police, they haven't a cat in hell's chance of hurting the state. What are they left with, just the chance to hurt the Black servants of the state.'
'So what do we do? Scratch our backsides, then what?'
'We just have to wait.'
It was a huge funeral.
The gathering was illegal. Under the amendment regulations following the state of emergency it was prohibited that mourners should march in formation to open air funeral services. It would have required a battalion of infantry to have prevented the column reaching the grave that had been prepared for the body of a thirteen- year-old girl, knocked over ten days before by a speeding Casspir.
Sometimes the regulations were enforced, sometimes not. Enforcement depended on the will of the senior police officer for the area, and the size of the forces available to him.
On this Sunday the military were not present. The police seemed to have stayed back and watched from a distance as the migrant ant mass of men and women and children took the small white wood coffin to the cemetery.
An orderly march to the grave. Hating faces, but controlled. The young men who had charge let the priest have his say, and they allowed the bereaved family to get clear in an old Morris car, and they gave time for the old men and the women and the small children to start back towards the township.
There was organisation of a sort in what happened afterwards.
A single police jeep was out in front of the main force, there to overlook and photograph. A shambling charge at the jeep, and the driver had lost his gears, and lost time, and the men who guarded the photographer and his long lens had fired volleys of bird shot and gas to keep the running, stoning crowd at a distance.
The driver of the jeep never found his gears. The crowd surged on, vengeance within reach. The police ditched the jeep, left it with the engine howling, ran for their lives. Good and fit, the policemen, and running hard because they knew the alternative to running fast, knew what happened to policemen who were caught by a funeral mob. The photographer didn't run fast, not as fast as he had to run. The lens bouncing awkwardly from his stomach, and the camera bag on his shoulder, and none of the policemen with guns taking the time to cover him.
The officers commanding the police were still shouting their orders when the fleetest of the mob caught up with the photographer. The photographer was White and a year and a half short of his fiftieth birthday. A growl in the mob, the breath intake of a mad dog.
The hacking crack of rifle fire, aimed at random into the crowd at four hundred metres. The crowd of youths not caring because the photographer was caught.
The Casspirs came forward, and the kids fled before them, back towards the township.
The photographer was naked but for one shoe and his socks and the camera with the long lens that lay on his
