The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 12

  Warmth engulfed us as we reached the tip of the topmost stand. For one awful moment I thought the smiling ANC-capped marshal at the top of the stairs would embrace us. But he swerved aside at the last moment. I think he saw my face. He and Joe gripped each other’s shoulders instead. I can’t bear touching at the best of times but in all this mushy sentimentality, it would just be too much.

  ‘Welcome, Comrades!’ Two black women – one plump and buxom-breasted, the other gaunt – bobbed down the stand to grip our hands. There was a gushing quality, I thought, to their display of joy at our lily-white presence. I was embarrassed that they were so thrilled to have us and then I was embarrassed, all over again, at Joe’s effusive gratitude at being greeted so fervently.

  ‘Viva the ANC! Viva!’ The voice booms from vast loudspeakers.

  ‘Viva!’ roars the mighty-voiced crowd. The litany moves the mass to fling itself upright in religious ecstasy, its many fists flung skyward in an emotion-charged salute.

  I have to admit it’s impressive, this passionate power. Such strength in the ritual of the slogan, in the fervour of the congregation’s response.

  Smiles whirl from person to person. Oh God, Joe’s wallowing in it. He almost has tears in his eyes. I hunch on my seat, tearing at my nails, while he shakes all the waving hands behind us with his carefully practised two-handed grip and sliding, three-staged shake.

  ‘Hello, Comrade; Yes, thank you, Comrade; Afternoon, Com; Hello, Com, nice to see you here too …’

  A voice intones from the dais. A ‘liberation’ poet, I think he was called. He has just been introduced, but I wasn’t listening.

  ‘Welcome the leaders

  The leaders of the people

  Welcome the leaders

  They will free the people

  Welcome the leaders

  Of our land.

  Africa Our land.

  The people shall govern

  This land.’

  I sigh. The sun is drilling into my skull. Around me I can hear the hum of messianic devotion. Emotion pours its intensity over the sweating crowd. Joe’s eyes are on me again. I’m beginning to feel claustrophobic in the heated enclosure of his glances.

  I turn on him fiercely, but he’s moved his head again, watching the crowd and the faraway specks on the platform, wonderment in his glowing eyes and opened mouth.

  Momentarily, the eagerness in his face has trounced anxiety, but anxiety again gains the upper hand in his next quick, jabbing glances at me.

  I shift on the hard stand, moving my legs from one side to the other, in futile avoidance of the harsh blows of the hammering sun. There’s no escape here. People are still pouring on to the stand. I suppose if I get up and wander off I’ll lose my seat to someone and, horror of horrors, Joe’ll be forced to fight some virtuous comrade for my place and he’ll never forgive me.

  ‘Do you think generations of students will be kept busy analysing the deeper meanings in the poetry of this Alfred Tennyson of the liberation movement?’ I mumble, but quietly, so that no one can overhear and disapprove of us.

  ‘But he’s historically important.’ Joe is in his earnest, pedantic mode. ‘He’s the “people’s poet”, that’s why he’s important. But listen to his delivery – it’s quite amazing. He has such a hypnotic quality.’

  ‘Hypnotic is right,’ I mumble. ‘It’s an incantation to transform the crowd into the living dead.’

  ‘What was that, Kate?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, Joe. Nothing at all.’

  He burns the twisted smile from my face with the fervent light in his eyes. But then, suddenly, he smiles.

  ‘I don’t care how you resist it, Kate. You’re here, that’s all that matters. It’ll get to you, I know it will. Not even a block of wood could remain unmoved through this kind of experience. This is the most important event of our times. Do you know that? Doesn’t it make you feel just a little awed? That we’re part of it? It must be three or four decades since the ANC openly held a rally in this country.’

  ‘Yes, I feel immensely awed that I’m actually sitting here, the sun burning a hole in my head, while I listen to sweaty poems and heated slogans.’

  Joe continues smiling beatifically, infuriating me into flinging my surly frown towards the miles and miles of dusty cars beyond the stadium.

  I suddenly remember the giant ants we used to get in the Eastern Cape and how we would trap them beneath a magnifying glass, until they began to smoke and cook in the concentrated glare of the sun. I know how they felt, those ants. I wonder who is waiting for me to bake before eating me.

  There are dancers on the stage now, but they are too far away to see. How long overdue is this rally going to be, for God’s sake? It’s nearly an hour late already. People are streaming in and out now, bringing peanuts and ice-cream, sharing their goodies with a glowing neighbourliness.

  Our smiling marshal appears below the seats, clutching an armful of posters and Freedom Charter pamphlets. Snaking arms cluster in the air, reaching for the prizes he tantalisingly passes to whoever catches his eye. Joe, smiling to show that he thinks this is all great fun and that he isn’t in deadly earnest – well, not altogether – makes a quick grab at a poster on its path over his head. But he laughs good-naturedly as it is snatched from his tentative grasp.

  ‘More, more,’ yells the crowd. The marshal laughs. ‘I’ll bring more later.’

  Hundreds of flags flash red in the sunlight, or wave green, gold and black in the stands. The two – the red of the South African Communist Party and multicoloured ANC banner – share centre-stage glory behind the distant platform.

  ‘I’m too hot, Joe,’ I say suddenly. Perhaps I can enlist his sympathy. ‘I think I’ll go down behind the stands and investigate all the little kiosks down there.’

  Oh, what the hell, I can’t sustain the sympathy-seeking for long.

  ‘I want to take a closer look at all the busy workers, filled with entrepreneurial spirit, running the people’s businesses. Forward! The people shall trade. Let the people be liberated to employ assistants. Free enterprise for the people.’

  I’m running off at the mouth again. But he’d think I had died and become part of the angelic host if I didn’t jeer just a little bit.

  ‘OK, I’ll come with you,’ he says with a quick smile, surprising me. ‘It’s part of why I wanted us to be here.’ He answers the question in my eyes. ‘I want to experience it with you. I want to watch you see this rally – all its parts and all its people.’

  People are streaming on and off the stands, chatting, buying, laughing, holding hands, linking fingers. I feel more isolated in my protective insulation than I ever have before. That’s why I hate hope. I distrust it, and the weapon it gives the great cosmic joke-maker. But it also makes me feel like an empty orange, sucked dry through a hidden seep-hole, alone in a full pocket of juicy fruit.

  Slipping, sour and sucked, down the stairs behind the stands alongside Joe, I glance at the fronts of the people I pass, avoiding their eyes, and discover that I can read the entire history of the struggle off their T-shirts. ‘The People Shall Govern’, says a woman’s large breasts, while a man’s narrow chest holds the entire policy set out in the Freedom Charter. I pass two worn and scruffy ‘Organise and Mobilise’ chests and, at the bottom of the stairs, a ‘One Country, One Federation’ steps aside to let us pass. Large numbers of ‘Welcome the Leaders’ mingle with chains breaking on ‘Release the Leaders’ and ‘Release Mandela’.

  ‘We’re clearly living in the age of catchphrase politics. If policy can’t be expressed on a T-shirt, it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good way to make people aware, don’t you think? Clever, very clever,’ he says, his voice trailing away as he stops before a pair of upturned boxes to finger and unfold piles of T-shirts containing variations on the ‘Welcome the Leaders’ theme. Alongside are furthe
r piles of Rasta shirts.

  The Rastafarian selling the shirts leans his whole body into a diagonal line against a pole. His dreadlocks are tucked in a thick pad into his crocheted red, green and yellow beret.

  ‘How many you want?’

  I suppose this is what’s known as direct sales. You can’t get more direct than that.

  ‘Ah c’mon, Joe, you’re not seriously considering joining the ranks of the self-conscious nouveau ANC T-shirt-wearers in the northern suburbs?’

  ‘Just the one,’ he says to the Rastafarian, who shoves himself into a straight line with his shoulder.

  Joe looks up and smiles at me. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be wanting one … perhaps a little secret desire deep down?’

  ‘Huh! I don’t see why I should fall for this. Look at them all. They’re doing a roaring trade in the holy relics of the struggle. I think I’ll just manage to content myself with a sucker from the democratic workers’ ice-cream cooperative over there,’ I say indicating with my chin the men wandering up and down with polystyrene cooler boxes strung across their shoulders.

  Reaching our stand again, we find that our seat neighbour has kept our places by shifting across and spreading his picnic bag.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, remarkably gracious and lacking in sarcasm for me. Joe is still smiling; at me, at our neighbour, at the country, at the world.

  White faces scatter our top stand like freckles on the negative of a photo portrait. There is a stir now as a small group of middle-aged whites arrives. I notice the woman for her pale serenity and make-up free face. Of course, she spoils it by wearing the uniform of the ageing lefty: straw hat tied on with scarf, Indian skirt and leather sandals. In the sudden hum of shared information, the people on our stand are all bending towards neighbours, talking about them. I don’t make any move to ask, but my neighbour clearly feels I ought to know. He leans over, offers me a bite of his chicken leg and informs me that she’s the daughter of some famous lefty from the fifties. Big deal. And now she arrives like royalty, with her small coterie, lifting her hand in mildly-waved greeting.

  ‘They’re coming. They’re coming.’

  The noise rises like a wind-whipped moan across the stands and, in its passing, raises people from their seats. I can feel the joyous frenzy building in the toyi-toyiing bodies around me. Joe joins in but, for God’s sake, I’d feel just too ridiculous for words if I were he. Two rows in front, I can see the low-slung jeans of a plump white boy exposing too much pasty buttock as he toyi-toyis madly, clearly proud of his expertise.

  ‘Viva the tried and tested leaders of the ANC! Viva!’

  ‘Long live the tried and tested leaders!’

  ‘Long live the mothers!’

  ‘Viva the tried and tested mothers!’

  The hypnotic revivalist litany whips the stadium into a divine passion. Faces are raised to the heavens, fervent fists punch the air. I feel our stand, jutting out over a lower stand, begin to move in harmonic motion with the toyi-toyiing. For a moment, I think I must be entering into a holy ‘struggle’ experience. The Heavens Moved, that kind of thing.

  ‘A-N-C, A-N-C, A-N-C …’

  And then they are there, tiny specks emerging from a Mercedes-Benz far below us. The crowd’s roar overwhelms the stadium, the air, the sky. It loses the consciousness of human voices and becomes the primeval roar of the earth itself.

  Joe’s forgotten to keep watching me, he’s been swirled up by this tornado of euphoric hysteria.

  Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more. This is surreal, like a different world, for someone like me. I can actually see uniformed Umkhonto we Sizwe soldiers marching in a guard of honour far beneath us – this I never thought to see.

  And then we stand, faces raised to the punishing sun, for the hymn of the struggle, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. I watch Joe and the plump white boy, who has moved back to his place in our row. Their faces filled with the glory of visions, they fling their voices into the anthem. Joe makes it about halfway into the first verse before he begins mouthing and humming. The plump boy drops his face and looks at his feet, moving his lips quietly. It is, of course, quite difficult to learn a song in a language you don’t understand.

  Every one of the released men is expected to speak. As I read their names off the back of a T-shirt just below me, I wonder how many of these men we’ll ever hear of again. But today is their day. Today we will listen to them.

  I think that Raymond Mhlaba, the first unidentifiable speck on the horizon to speak, loses his audience after a few minutes of his pedantic description of the history of the struggle. Slowly the individuals around me emerge from their hypnotic trances and get on with the business of chatting, shouting to friends across the heads of others, eating, sharing bread, sausages and chicken. Small children, the mascots of the struggle, race up and down in front of the first row of seats, tripping over their oversized adult T-shirts emblazoned with ‘ANC Lives! ANC Leads!’

  ‘I think he should rather show slides of a few T-shirts and have done,’ I mutter to Joe, who I notice is breathing normally now and appears to have returned to the land of the sane and the living. He smiles as he brings his head close to mine in the solidarity of the cynical comment. But he doesn’t reply.

  I feel inexplicably sad; sad for Joe, sad for the gathering. I can’t work out why. There is joy in the glowing day, jubilation in the dancing limbs and smiling mouths. And I’m so used to jeering; I thought I’d lost my capacity to feel this sadness for others. But after all, why should I? Why should I feel for these people who haven’t yet lost what I lost, so brutally, so young?

  It strikes me that there’s a shining innocence to this gathering – OK, maybe most have seen and heard too much, lived too harshly, suffered too much brutality. But about this they are innocent. Hope soars above their sweat-glinting heads, hope and the expectation of deliverance. There is a sweetness to the ‘Jesus’ T-shirts worn below waving communist flags, to Azapo’s presence ‘in the spirit of comradeship’, to the arms outstretched to tentative white liberals. And, perhaps most of all, to the iconic purity and saintliness of those just released.

  The sadness comes in the pathos of the inevitable, the clay and mud syndrome. Clay feet of real live politicians, and mud-slinging between above-ground political parties. Outside of mythology, very few lions ever get to lie down with lambs. Give them a few months. They’ll be brutalising and stabbing each other in the back with the best of them.

  They’re all the same. I have no illusions about humans and their nature. Particularly in this country where, it seems to me, human behaviour mirrors its environment. This is too harsh and brutal a land. It has too few rolling contours and rain-washed meadows to breed soft, green sentiments. This is not the country to sustain this dangerous level of jubilant hope for long.

  Of course I know my husband’s innocence. Its manifestations irritate me and yet, deep down, I know that’s one of the reasons I chose him. He is my own innocence lost, and perhaps it is this constant reminder which chafes at me, yet binds me to him.

  I am amused, in my detached superiority, by his glowing naïvety. But this rally has affected me in a way I never contemplated. To see his faith and trust multiplied so many thousand times fills an aching void with sadness. I think it flows for their innocence, still inexorably to be lost. But I know it is also for mine. I feel sorry for myself; sorry that I’ve been sucked of the juice of my simplicity and doomed to witness the greatest surge of hope the country has ever seen. Great cosmic joke, that!

  As the history of the struggle struggles on, fighting its way through layers of heat and lethargy, I lean forward to glance along the rows of faces. Suddenly, in the distorting shimmer of the sunlight, they transmute into the brutal faces of the Eastern Cape, the faces of my shattered childhood, of inexpressible eight-year-old horror vomited on to the thorned ground.

  In the next instant t
hey are gone. And with them, my sadness. I feel it overtaken by a perverse pleasure at the disillusionment to come. Why should I be the one to carry the burden of this bitter knowledge for so long, and so alone?

  ‘Today we see the apartheid regime facing a deep and irreversible crisis.’

  I cannot see Walter Sisulu at all, but his voice wings clearly across the stadium to us. He stresses our unity in this divided country of ours. And with his priestly demeanour he draws everyone in: the workers, the police, young white men resisting army call-up.

  Of course, all this saintly goodwill and unity perceived, emphasised so artfully in Sisulu’s words, exist only in the presence of a recognised evil. The common enemy is still at large and Sisulu uses it, recalls it to their eyes. The power of darkness, though greatly weakened, is not yet vanquished. The scent of righteous victory is in every nostril on this crusade for godly power. The devil’s legions are to blame, he proclaims, for the violence among the righteous people of Natal.

  ‘While we have made many strides, the carnage among our people in Natal is a blot on our noble struggle for liberation.’

  He pauses to allow the crowd’s assent to pass.

  ‘It is the evil hand of apartheid that is behind the violence in Natal. Reports of police collusion in the killings abound. We know that it is the general characteristic of the ruling class to divide our people.’

  Drawing to a dramatic and climactic close, Sisulu flings his oration to his congregation and beyond.

  ‘We must unite in action with the broadest range of apartheid’s opponents. We should not allow ideological and other differences to stand in the path of our unity against apartheid.’

  ‘Great,’ I whisper to Joe but he avoids me now, my eyes and my head leant closer to his, inviting cynical solidarity. ‘Now we’re all drawn into this great big laager of love.’

  He is silent. I can see uplift glowing in his eyes and in the deep rise and fall of his chest.

  ‘These ANC guys should’ve been revivalist preachers: they would’ve made a fortune.’