Strong Medicine (10 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Transcript of Interview

Inmate Number: 7865649

Bongani Zulu

27 August 2005

CMAX Prison, Pretoria

Detective Tshabalala (DT): There are other incidents from your village, around the time from 1966 to 1978, which we want to ask you about.

Bongani Zulu (BZ): I won’t tell you anything if it will get me into trouble.

DT: You know we are trying to get info on the man they call Makulu. He’s the one we want.

BZ: I can’t give you details about him. He will get me.

DT: Listen, we know you worked with him. If you don’t help us, we will prosecute you as an accomplice.

BZ: Ask.

DT: Tell us about Thokozile Mnandi.

BZ: Fuck.

DT: You know about her.

BZ: Everybody in the Thousand Hills knows about her. That was a bad business.

DT: Tell us what you know about her murder.

BZ: She was living with her grandmother. The mother was working in Johannesburg as a domestic for a white woman. The grandmother sent Thoko to the
spaza
shop to buy cool drink or something. I don’t know, it was something simple like that. Thoko never came home.

It was four, five days later that we found her body in the grass down by the river. What was left.

DT: She was killed for
muti
?

BZ: Yes, they’d taken her eyes, her arms. This part between her legs.

DT: Please carry on.

BZ: It was terrible. The look on her face when we found her. Like she’d died in so much pain.

DT: It upset you when they found her?

BZ: What do you think? We were only thirteen. She was my friend.

DT: What else can you tell me? What did the police do?

BZ: They came to the village, asked a lot of questions. They were white cops, they didn’t understand. They thought it was a crazy person who’d killed her. They arrested a man, but he didn’t go to jail.

DT: Who did they arrest? Makulu?

BZ: No, one of the other men, Vusi Dube.

DT: But he didn’t go to jail?

BZ: No, they took him to the station, kept him for a few days. When he came home he had a lot of bruises on him. But he didn’t kill Thoko.

DT: Do you know who did?

BZ: I don’t know. The cops never did anything after Vusi came back.

DT: Where was Makulu at this time?

BZ: He was there, in the village. He’d been the
sangoma
for a few years already. Maybe three years.

DT: Were there murders before he was the
sangoma
?

BZ: Yes. Fights, a husband kills his wife’s lover. That kind of thing. Thoko was the first to be killed for
muti
.

DT: But she wasn’t the last?

BZ: No. There were many more.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I went to see my sister after the marriage. When I got to their house, everything was quiet. I let myself inside and they were there on the bed. There was too much blood everywhere. They had been killed. There were parts missing. The lips, hands, even their private parts. I called the cops.”

- Witness, Limpopo province, South Africa.

#

Saturday morning dawned cold and grey. Heavy blue clouds hung low to the earth. A fine rain misted the air, too light to fall. It clung to my cheeks and dusted my eyebrows as Busi and I made our way to my car.

“This is no kind of Joburg weather,” Busi said while we clipped ourselves in and I started the engine.

“Ja.” I turned the heater to max and shivered in the cold blast of air. It would warm up after a few kilometers. “This feels more like Cape Town.”

“I’ve never been to Cape Town. I’ve never even been out of Joburg.” Busi laughed at herself.

We were on our way to see a
sangoma
Busi knew. The woman’s name was Rhea. She lived in Alex, a crowded township wedged in between the lush, wealthy suburbs of Sandton to the west, and Lyndhurst to the south. I’d driven past on the highway many times before. I’d sneak wary glimpses at the corrugated iron shacks that so many people called home and say a silent prayer that I’d never be that poor.

The roads were busy, as always, and slippery from the rain. The gentle drizzle turned into a persistent downpour as we drove. I stuck to the slow lane and kept to eighty kilometers an hour. A few wankers in BMWs sped past, weaving between the three lanes of traffic on the highway. I swore at them under my breath.

Busi laughed again as I ground my teeth and turned onto London Road. “Don’t worry, whitey, you’ll be safe as long as you stick with me.”

Alex was the one place you never went. The township had always been a flash-point during the old regime. Violent protest seemed ingrained in the people here. Violence in general marked their lives. Outbreaks of xenophobic violence often happened here. Service delivery protests were a common sight. Not that you can blame the people who have to live in squalor here.  I’d also burn buildings if it was the only way to draw attention to the circumstances.

It wasn’t the civic violence that worried me though. Anytime you drive into a place with so many desperate people, living below the poverty line, you become an automatic target. 

“I don’t know, Busi.” I tried to relax my aching fingers, to release the steering wheel enough that my knuckles would regain their normal tone. “I’ve never gone in… somewhere like this before.”

“What? A squatter camp?”

A grey wall loomed up on the left side of the road. Rust stains ran from the sagging barbed-wire down its graffiti-marked surface. A three-storey building squatted in the gloom behind it, all the windows smashed. On our right the backs of houses lined the road, a patchwork of sunbaked bricks, corrugated iron, and salvaged wood.

Men and women walked along the sidewalk with their heads down and their hands in their pockets. I shivered in sympathy. Occasionally one of them would look at me, scowling at the intruder in their midst.

“Ja,” I said. “We were always told to stay away from the townships.”

“These people don’t have a lot of money, but they are just normal people. They have children, parents, jobs. Sure, there are some criminals among them, but they are mostly just hard-working people like you and me.”

My cheeks burned as Busi talked in her happy, non-judgmental voice. I tried to relax and stop myself from assessing every pedestrian as a threat, but the habit was so deeply ingrained that I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t stop myself from staring at each of the people on the road with wide, ostrich eyes. Any one of the dozens of men walking past might decide that he wanted my car, or my body. And how could I stop him in this place? Where the passers-by were as likely to side with him as they were to help me.

“Turn right here,” Busi said, pointing to a dirt road between two walls, one made of tumbled-together stones, the other a dull silver iron wall.

I tapped my indicator and tried to concentrate on the quiet beats between the plasticky clicking of the flasher and my racing heart. This was it. No turning back now. I was about to go into a place that had always been barred to me as a white-skinned South African. Maybe not literally, but it was an unspoken rule: White people don’t go into places like this. Not if they want to live.

#

Rhea greeted us at her door with open arms and a closed smile. She wore a thick bathrobe, but her feet were bare. She was older than Busi. Her hair was mostly grey, with a few black highlights. A threadbare bathrobe was all that protected her from the winter chill. She moved slowly and winced with each step.

Everything she owned was crammed into one tiny room. Newspapers lined the walls as insulation, and a threadbare lace curtain hung in front of the only window I could see. The room stank of greasy paraffin smoke and boiled meat.

Busi and Rhea embraced, and then Busi introduced me. The
sangoma
took my hands in hers and smiled.

“Thank you for coming to me,” she said. “I will do whatever I can to help you.”

I nodded, struck dumb by the circumstances I had walked into. Was I really going to let a woman who was, essentially, little more than a psychic con artist lie to me about what had happened to my daughter?

I wouldn’t go to a medium to talk to my father’s ghost, so why was I here? What made this different?

She led us silently through a door at the back and into another, darker room. An old bookshelf leaned against the wall, the shelves crammed with bottles, cans and margarine tubs.

“We will do the reading here.” She indicated a grass mat on the hard-packed dirt floor. “Please take off your shoes and sit down.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked as I removed my sneakers.

“I’m going to speak to my ancestors. They will give us guidance in whatever problem you are facing.”

Rhea draped a red-and-white cloth over my shoulders when I sat, then opened a wobbly wooden door and called into the back garden. Four young women filed in. They were dresses like the Zulu dancers at big sports events; all animal skins, bead necklaces, and elaborate face paint. 

Busi spoke to the
sangoma
in a language I didn’t recognize, and then turned for the door.

“Wait!” I called out to her. “Aren’t you going to stay?” I couldn’t do this on my own. I couldn’t be surrounded by these strange women in their buck-skin loin cloths and shimmering bracelets.

“I’m not part of this,” Busi said.

“It’s okay.” Rhea beckoned for Busi to come back. “The ceremony will work better if she is less stressed. You can stay but you must keep out of the way.”

Busi nodded and took up position behind me. I smiled at her.

Rhea sat down across from me, just out of reach, and tied an impala-skin headband around her head. She tucked a few strands of grey hair into place beneath it. Bright red, green and yellow beads stood out among the grey strands. Her face was an intricate tapestry of wrinkles and laugh lines.

“What is your problem?” Her voice filled the shack, smoky and rough. “What are you suffering from? Maybe you are not sick. There is a conflict in you. Maybe you want to know what is the problem, what is going on? These bones will tell what is wrong.”

She started chanting in an African language. The words tumbled from her mouth and danced through the air around us. She shook her hands, rattling the small collection of bones and shells held in her palms.

Her voice rose and her chants became more urgent. Sweat dripped from her lips. Her brows knitted together. The bones and shells tumbled to the mat between us.

The
sangoma
inspected the collection of trinkets for a moment. She snapped her fingers and started another chant in a gentler tone.

“
Fumani
,” she said.

“
Siyavuma
,” the three younger women sitting next to her, their shoulders covered with cloths similar to mine, answered her.

“
Fumani
,” the
sangoma
said again.

“
Siyavuma
,” the younger women repeated.

My legs started to ache from sitting cross-legged on the floor, and my bare feet stung from the cold. I shifted to try and release some of the pressure and the
sangoma’s
hand shot up and held me in place.

“There is something terrible in your soul,” the
sangoma
said.

All I could do was nod in agreement. I didn’t want to give her many details of Lindsey’s disappearance. A part of me was ever the skeptic. A part of me couldn’t find the words to tell her what had happened to my baby.

The
sangoma
pored over the scattering of shells, waving a black-feathered wand over them. Every movement was accompanied by the gentle susurration of hundreds of beads. They dangled from her wrists, her hair, and in a heavy necklace against her broad chest.

“There is great pain, you have lost something precious. Someone?”

I nodded again, my eyes closed as I tried to hold the tears in behind my lids.

“Yes,” the
sangoma
said. Her acolytes were quiet now. “The spirits show me, they tell me you are looking for someone. Someone younger. Your child?”

The tears broke from my eyes and slid down my cheeks. I wiped them away with the back of a hand.

“You want to know who took your child?”

Of course I did. That was why I was there, why I’d gone to that cold, dark shack in the middle of a township. That was why I sat on the floor, my feet almost numb with the cold that seeped up through the concrete and into my bones.

Could this woman really tell me where Lindsey was? Didn’t it make sense for her to guess that a grieving woman might be looking for a missing child? I wanted to believe that she could help me, but maybe she’d just made a lucky guess.

Detective Brits’s blank stare flashed in my mind. I remembered the pressure of his hands as he pressed me out of the police station. He didn’t care about finding Lindsey. Then I saw Lindsey’s soft cheek, her lips slack and squished together as she slept in our bed. Perhaps this was my only hope, even if it was a slim one.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Please help me find my daughter.”

“Your ancestors will help us to find her, even though you do not honor them. It’s okay, you are white, you don’t know how.”

“Will you show me how?” My voice cracked as I opened myself to the possibility that this woman might be able to help. Perhaps she did have some power, something that allowed her to guess so accurately. Doubt weighed heavily on my heart, but what other choice did I have?

“I will show you.”

The
sangoma
stood and rummaged through the collection of old baby formula tins, glass coffee bottles, and plastic milk bottles which were stacked on the bookshelf behind her. She returned to the circle with a bunch of herbs, their stems tied together with a piece of yellowing string. As she sat, she struck a match and held it to the bundle in her hand. Flames leaped from the dry leaves, filling the air with a thick smoke and the smell of burning grass with a side of human hair.

I coughed, gasping in the fumes as the
sangoma
waved the burning herbs under my nose.

Her acolytes stood and started dancing around us. They wore heavy ankle bracelets made up of dozens of Coke can lids all strung together on thin wire. The lids jangled and slapped together in a discordant jumble as they danced. The women started singing and chanting in time with their stamping feet and clashing bracelets.

It was all I could do not to clamp my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut to escape the sensual assault. The noise, smell and the sight of their legs streaming around me made me dizzy. I felt a lump of bile rising in my throat and choked it back.

The
sangoma
dropped the burning leaves in front of me and I fixed my eyes on the dancing orange flames as they ate the last of the bushel, and then died. The tumult in the room died with them. I was ensconced in a quiet, black night. There was no movement, no sound, not even the smell of the burnt herbs. Only the sound of my breathing, frantic at first but slowing down as I let myself relax into the warm darkness.

After some time had passed, I don’t know if it was five minutes or five seconds, I saw dark shapes coalescing among the blackness. Shadows moved around me, like sharks circling their prey.

Then a pair of eyes opened in front of me. Milky white. Staring right into my soul.

I screamed.