Strong Medicine (20 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY

Transcript of Interview

Inmate Number: 7865649

Bongani Zulu

15 July 2008

CMAX Prison, Pretoria

DETECTIVE BRITS (DB): You’re a lucky man, Mr. Zulu.

BONGANI ZULU (BZ): My ancestors are powerful, they know I respect them and they are helping me.

DB: Yes. Well, many people are asking questions about your inclusion in the amnesty. You’re the only murderer being released. Four thousand petty criminals and one confessed murderer. There are a lot of people asking a lot of questions.

BZ: Let them ask.

DB: Some people say you are a witchdoctor. They say you’ve used magic to get out.

BZ: (Laughing)

DB: Is it true? Are you a witchdoctor Mr. Zulu?

BZ: I’ve worked with
inyanga
, witchdoctors, but I am not like that. I’m a traditional healer.

DB: What’s the difference? Between a witchdoctor and a traditional healer?

BZ: Traditional healers help people, we do good things. A witchdoctor does the evil. The difference is in the person’s heart.

DB: But you’ve killed people, isn’t that evil?

BZ: That was a different time. I have changed.

DB: The last time we spoke, I told you about children being killed in Soweto. Someone extracted their organs. Tell me what you think about that?

BZ: That’s the evil way of making magic. The
inyanga
take the body parts to make
muti
, medicine. If someone has a problem like they want more money or they want to get their lover back, they can get
muti
for that.

The
sangoma
, a traditional healer, knows other magic, older magic. They might tell the person to have sex with a brother or sister as part of the magic. That is pure magic, they don’t need the organs. The ancestors tell us those magics when we honor them.

DB: Some people say they use human organs to attract clients to their businesses. What do you think of that?

BZ:  There are some people who do that, but we don’t need to use organs to attract people. There are other magics we can use. There was a man who killed his son to cut the hand to sell. He went to a shop and asked the guard to speak to the boss, but the guard said no. Then they discovered that the man had the hand to sell. The boss said the man must go to the police because he was a crook and they didn’t have an agreement. But the man was deceived by someone else who said there was an agreement. He didn’t even know how to use
muti
.

Sangomas
don’t take organs, the crooks do that. But people don’t know, and they say it’s the
sangomas
who do this.

DB: So you’re saying that the people who you killed for were crooks and they lied to you?

BZ: I’m not an evil man. I try to help people. Those other things were long ago.

DB: Do you recognize this child?

BZ: Who is he?

DB: He was my son. Someone took him five years ago. We found his body by the Jukskei River. Most of his body.

BZ: That’s a tragedy.

DB: He would have been eight now. He was just a baby when he was taken.

BZ: Only an evil person could do that.

DB: I think you did it. The wounds, the place we found him, it all matches the things you were doing. You were living in Alex at the time. On the banks of the Jukskei.

BZ: Alex is a dangerous place, full of evil people. It could have been anybody.

DB: It could have been, but it was you. I know it. I can feel it in my gut. You took my son, you killed him and you mutilated his tiny body. I will find evidence and when I do I will find you.

BZ: Fuck you, pig.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“That guy came to him and covered his mouth and took him deeper into the bush. Then he cut his private parts and ran away with his private parts. His friends found him lying in the bushes.

People need money. That’s why they do this things to little boys like my son. People are desperate. They will do anything for money. They will kill for money.”

- Father of
muti
attack victim, North-West province, South Africa.

#

Saturday marked the twelfth day since Lindsey had disappeared and life in our house was almost back to normal. Except for the silence that forced its way into every room with me. I lay in bed listening to the city. A few birds welcomed the dawn, while the ever-present drone of traffic filled the air. The cold front had struck during the night and I pulled my duvet over my head to block out the frigid air.

Lindsey and I would normally cuddle up in this kind of weather, pressing our bodies close together and sharing the warmth between us.

I couldn’t lie in our bed any longer. Not with the cold fingers of winter dragging their torn nails over my heart. I got up, brushed my hair and pulled on a pair of thick black tracksuit pants over my long johns. I jammed my arms into the sleeves of my dad’s old army jacket and went down the stairs and out the front door.

Mr. Botha wasn’t out yet. The sun was barely up over the horizon. Its bright red face was masked by the pall of smoke that hung over the city. I took out a Camel and lit it.

I was running out of options faster than I could burn cigarettes.

There was one person I could turn to, the old
inyanga
to whom Rhea had taken me. He knew Makulu, and he could steer me in the right direction. But would he?

There was only one way to find out. I would have to ask him.

After I’d washed, dressed and eaten breakfast, I dug through the kitchen drawers until I found the family torch, a tiny Maglite about the size of my pinkie. I clicked it on and held it to my palm. A small yellow circle glowed on my skin.

The drive in to the city was slow, even though it was Saturday. The closer to the city center I got, the worse the traffic was. Then I started noticing the yellow and black flags in car windows, proudly displaying the team colours of the Kaizer Chiefs Football club.

The roads were crammed with soccer fans on their way to Ellis Park stadium. I’d be stuck in the traffic almost all the way to the
inyanga’s
house.

I crawled along through the gridlock, one more indiscernible segment in the giant iron
shongololo
creeping along the roads.

By the time I made it onto Joe Slovo Drive, the sun had burned most of the haze out of the air. My fingers were starting to warm up on the steering wheel. I stuck them out straight to catch more of the sunlight coming in through the windscreen.

The robot in front of me turned red. A baby blue taxi swooped past me in a wave of thundering bass, skipped the red light and cruised right through the intersection.

“Crazy bastard,” I swore under my breath, but my heart wasn’t in it. Ponte tower hulked over the intersection, all fifty-odd stories of white-washed decay. The wail of sirens and hooters filled the air, bouncing off the faded paint and grimy brickwork that made the inner city as appealing as a pus-filled blister.

Pedestrians thronged the sidewalks, out for a morning’s shopping in the city. Every now and again someone would brush past my window, peering in at the seat or scanning the space beneath my knees.

“No luck today, fuckers.” Heaps of glass shards lined the lanes in the intersection. It was a common sight in the city, and even in the outlying suburbs. A man would walk up to your car, glance in through the window all calm and whatever. The next thing you know he’s smashed your window with a rock, climbed in, and grabbed your handbag off the chair.

I’d stashed my cell phone and a wad of cash in my sock. It shifted every time I moved my leg to press the brake or the accelerator, but at least the would-be smash-n-grabbers moving through the crowd around me couldn’t see any easy pickings inside my car.

Lindsey had called the city ‘crime town’ when she was little. It was an accurate description. You had to accept that you’d get mugged or hijacked if you strayed into Joburg’s inner streets, day or night. And here I was, perched on the edge of Joe Slovo Drive, hovering on the border of the ‘safe’ part of town, about to plunge into the dark side, the part of town you didn’t go to if you had any sense.

Desperation can drive the sense out of you like sharks driving a school of fish.

The light turned green and I pressed the Uno forward. I turned off Joe Slovo and down a steep little road that took me into the shadows of the overpass. A pair of women sat on the pavement behind make-shift stalls. Packets of bright orange chips were arranged next to bananas and apples, matches, and an assortment of sweets.

I’d driven this way with Rhea only a day before, but I couldn’t recognize anything. The graffiti all melded together into one yellow-red-white blur. The buildings all smudged together, every one with face brick or stained and faded paint. Broken windows leered at me, promising dark mysteries behind their empty frames.

A bus stop caught my eye. The Rea Vaya logo emblazoned on the glass terminal, construction tape around the whole thing to keep people out. It stood out in my mind, finally, a beacon in the slurry.

A few minutes later I was standing outside the two-story building Rhea and I had visited the day before. Sweet smoke filled the air around me. I held my breath and walked towards the stairway at the back of the building. The three young men who’d demanded money from us the day before were nowhere to be seen. The little boy’s plastic motorbike lay in the dirt next to the building, and a heavy bass beat drifted down from the roof.

I pulled the Maglite out of my pocket and clicked it on. The bright yellow beam lit up the stairway like a lighthouse beacon.

It made avoiding the dirty nappies, empty KFC containers, and rats a lot easier. I took the stairs two at a time. The little light bobbed across the accumulated crap in the stairway and along the passage. The smoke was heavier up here, the music louder too. Candlelight flickered around the edges of the
inyanga’s
door. I knocked hard, three times, and wiped my hand on my jeans. God knows what I’d touched since I had come in here.

The door creaked open and the light of my torch cast harsh shadows across the old man’s crepe-paper skin.

“Why did you come back?”

“I need to find my daughter. You’re the only person who can help me. Please?”

“We can’t speak in the passage.” He closed the door. I heard the clinking of the lock, then the door swung wide and the old man stepped aside. “Please, come in.”

The single room was his entire home. It had, many years before, been a bathroom. The shower head still stuck out of the wall at eye level on the right of the door. Four rows of shelves ran all around the room, bottles and tins stood on the shelves. A single candle burned low on a small table on the left. I could just make out the contents of some of the bottles in the dim light, powders, leaves, things I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. Bushels of leaves hung from the ceiling, swaying gently on their hooks.

“What do you think I can do?” The old man sat on a foam mattress which lay in the corner. The threadbare corners of a neatly folded blanket stuck out from beneath a yellowed pillow behind him.

“You know the man who took my daughter.” I sat on the bare concrete floor in front of the old man. “There must be something you can do.”

“I can’t tell you where to find him.”

“Why not? Are you afraid of him?”

“No.” The old man shook his head but his eyes widened at the thought of the man. “I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t come to the city in a while.”

“Do you have a phone number for him?”

“No.” The old man chuckled. “What would I do with it? I don’t have a phone.” His laughter increased until he started coughing. He hacked up a glob of green slime and spat it into an old tin can next to his bed.

“Is there nothing you can do? Please?”

The old man scrunched his lips together and peered at me through slitted eyes. We sat like that for a long time. When he finally spoke I was ready for his refusal.

“We could ask the ancestors to help you. You say they helped you once already. There is a potion I can make that might give you the answers you need.”

“You mean…
muti
?” I struggled to get the word out of my mouth. Lindsey had been kidnapped for
muti
and now this old bastard wanted me to use the stuff? I shuddered and my skin prickled with goose bumps. I couldn’t. I would never. My mouth formed the ‘No’, but I couldn’t make the word come out. This was my last chance. The only option I had left.

“Is it made with human parts?”

The old man laughed, coughed, spat. “No, of course not.”

Okay, if it wasn’t human, I could do it. I swallowed hard and nodded. “Let’s do it.”

“It’s not free.” The old man said.

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

“What? I don’t have that kind of money!”

He held his arms out at his sides, palms up, in the universal sign of ‘
Well-fuck-you-then-I-can’t-help-you
.’

“Okay, okay.” My mouth spun words while my brain churned. “What about my torch?” I held the Maglite out to him. He took it and smiled, turned it over in his hands, then unscrewed the cap at the back and slid the battery out. Satisfied with the mechanics, he slipped the torch into his pocket and looked up at me expectantly.

“What else?”

What else? I don’t have anything else. I felt my pockets. I had nothing but my car keys and my cell phone.

“I don’t have anything else.”

“Give me your cell phone.”

“My cell?” I pulled it out of my pocket and wiped lint from the screen. It was an old Nokia, the kind that never ever died, no matter how often you dropped it. I’d bought it when I left Lindsey’s dad and had never needed another. Beyond that, it held nearly ten years of memories in the blurry photos that nearly filled its memory card.

There were photos of Lindsey’s first day at school, her first netball game, and the day we spent at Gold Reef City.

“I don’t know if I can.” The cell phone fit perfectly in my hand. I pressed the green phone and the screen lit up, Lindsey’s smile beamed out at me. “The photos…”

“If you are that strongly attached to it, I can wait for you to draw the cash.”

Five hundred rand was way more money than I had available. Even under the best circumstances I wouldn’t have that kind of cash floating around.

“No, it’s okay.” I wiped a tear from my cheek and handed the phone to the old man. If this worked, I would get to hold Lindsey again, and that was worth far more than an old cell phone.

#

I lifted the
calabash
to my lips. Two dark green globs floated in the thick brown concoction within, like eyeballs in onion soup. My stomach clenched and I closed my eyes to block the image from my mind. There was nothing I could do to stop the coppery smell from sliding up my nose to fill my mouth like warm snot. I parted my lips and prepared to drink.

“This is what you need to do,” the
inyanga’s
voice tickled at my ears. “The ancestors will answer your questions. This is the best way to get in touch with them.”

I ran my fingers along the curved surface of the
calabash
, the fine grain worn almost smooth by years of handling. How many people had put this vessel to their lips, in this room?

“You’re sure it’s safe?”

He stared at me, the milky cataracts in his eyes reflecting the candlelight back at me. It was like looking into the eyes of a corpse. “You’re young and healthy.” The old man wheezed. “You should be fine. I don’t know. You’re white.”

Not exactly the reassurance I’d been hoping for.

I pushed all the air out of my lungs, and tipped the
calabash
until the thick, cold potion slopped against my lips. One of the floating things brushed against my top lip. My stomach clenched, but I managed to keep the revulsion from spilling up through my chest and out my mouth. I parted my lips. A stringy lump slid onto my tongue. It lay there, wet and smooth, defying the desperate silent screams in my head. I tipped further. The potion oozed between my lips, around my teeth, along the top of my mouth. It felt like I had a mouthful of cold oil. It was bitter and sour at the same time, like I had a mouthful of dead fish and lemon juice. I swallowed once, twice, again and again until the last lump had disappeared.

“Ugh!” I put the
calabash
down, wiped at my mouth with the back of my sleeve and squinted through tears at the old man. His face split in a gap-toothed grin.