“Sikhona” was his reply, appropriately. He tried to pronounce “Sikhona,” with less of the guttural tone of his language to emphasize local nativeness.
They asked him where he was going and where he was coming from in the Sotho dialect. They knew there were few outsiders who would know that glottal language. It was the most complex to learn.
When he failed to instantly answer, they smiled at each other. The policemen were like wolves, waiting for the first wrong word to descend upon their prey. They were, however, still sitting in their car which he thought to himself was a good sign. Facing him with no faces, watching him with no eyes, he thought.
Finally, they climbed out and asked for his passport. He had it in his hands already. Getting out his passport from his pocket before he was asked for it had become, for him, normal, even automatic. Whenever he saw a policeman or police vehicle passing by, he felt like stopping and waving his passport to absolve himself from this tremendous guilt he felt for feeling like a foreigner in a land that didn’t like foreigners.
That feeling had started some months before when he and some of his friends were stopped by the police on their way to Johannesburg, just after the flyovers on M2. The police can be so abusive, sometimes. On that night, not long before, they were out to prove something.
They had asked for documents. He had left his passport at home that night, and couldn’t produce it. The policemen accused them of being thieves, their reasoning being that this must be the case since all of the passengers in the car were of different nationalities. His friend, Awilo Yambongo, was from the DRC, and his friend’s friend, John Phiri, was from Malawi, whose friend, Kenneth Musanide, was from Zambia, and he was from Zimbabwe. The policemen ordered them to get out of the car with their hands up.
They were required to flash their documents with one hand whilst the other hand had to be kept finger-spread on the car’s roof; their legs were, likewise, expected to be spread out. The police forced them against the car, their knees jammed against their testicles as they searched them. These policemen searched with a fierceness that only comes from a grudge, from a trapped, tepid, maddening anger. So eager to diffuse any threat to their peace of mind, they searched for the explosives and terrorists; they knew must be in the car, underneath the car, on their bodies, in their hearts, in their speech.
hey noticed that one man wasn’t holding his passport up. When they asked him where his passport was, he told them he had left it at home. They laughed sarcastically. They asked him what his name was. He told one of them that his name was Chatindo. They asked whether he could to prove it. He knew he couldn’t, since he didn’t have any documentation. He said, “No.”
They told his friends that they were going to take him to the police station to the Lindela Repatriation Centre to begin the process of deporting him back to Mugabe. They emphasized that he would be deported back to Mugabe, not to Zimbabwe, as if Zimbabwe had been renamed Mugabe without his knowledge.
He knew what they implied and what they were trying to do. They were trying to scare him and his friends. They told his friends to pay up if they didn’t want him to be deported. His friends offered 100 rands which they took, but refused to release him, saying they needed more money. His friends added another 50 rands which they took, though they still refused to release him, demanding still more. He told his friends to let the police take him. His friends said they would not leave him to those greedy bastards.
Other police cars plying the route sped past quickly. They never stopped to talk or to inquire what the matter was; they knew this was nothing more than another low-budget shakedown. His friends offered another 100 rands which the policemen took, but still refused to let him go free. Not knowing what else to do, his friends started haggling with the policemen. He felt like a house on auction. It was a foul memory of a time long before his existence. It was wrong. A life should never be haggled over. A life is not a possession that can be traded, bought, or sold.
That’s when an explosion happened in his heart, refusing to be diffused, swelling, thundering inside his chest, but the words of protest got stuck in his mouth. He knew that, if he were to open his mouth, then he would have let loose the expletives against these policemen. And he knew that using such language would end poorly, not just for himself but for all of his friends there.
So he kept silent while they haggled on his actual auction price. His friends haggled and haggled. When the policemen finally realized they were not going to get anything more from his friends, they released him with a warning that he should always travel with his passport. After that encounter, that night he and his friends had returned home for they no longer had the money to spend in Johannesburg. So it had come to pass that, since that night, he wanted to show every policeman his passport.
Now, on this day, it happened again. He was singled out by these policemen. Sure, they were different police, but they still were police. The routine was the same. The grudge was the same. The jackals asked him for the passport again. This time he gave them the passport. They scrutinized it as if it would miraculously become invalid. He could feel the hunger in their eyes for his passport to be somehow not completely in order. He also knew he wasn’t going to get out of this situation easily, as these policemen looked broke and desperate. They returned his passport to him when they found it was very much legal, but still hesitated, waiting for something more. They wanted money.
hen he asked them what they wanted, they said that if he didn’t give them something, then they would simply take him to the police station and falsely detain him for some trumped-up charge. They told him that he should pay them whatever he felt was enough for drinks. Knowing that they would follow through on their threats, he gave them the 30 rands he had in his wallet. He didn’t want to spend a night in the police cells, so it was worth giving them every last bit of his money. They complained it was too little, but he told them it was all he had.
They asked to search his wallet so he gave it to them. After they had meticulously searched it and found nothing more, they threw it in his face and insulted him, calling him a dirty makwerekwere (scavenger). This was the derogatory name his countrymen were being called by the South Africans. Then they drove off. He was angry, but there was nothing he could do about it other than suck it up. That was the game. He knew that all of this was nothing compared to what he had lived through. It was not his country, he reasoned. He didn’t have the right to ask to be treated respectfully.
He had come to learn to deal with that kind of illtreatment in his country of exile. He had come to accept that foreigners don’t have rights in this country when he had been caught in the xenophobic mob attacks just two years earlier. Up to that time, he had been staying in a shack with his friend, Awilo, and a couple of other Zimbabweans. These were tight quarters with no comfort.
The four of them had shared one shack, no bed, and a couple of pots and plates. They were trying to rebuild their lives in this country to which they had escaped just some four or so months before. They had been providing contractual work at the industries, mostly factories, in Primrose.
An extract from KEYS IN THE RIVER: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga, a novel of interlinked stories that deals with life in modern day Zimbabwe was published by Savant books and publications, USA, 2012. For more info pse see: www.prlog.org/11953206. To contact the author email: mwanaka@yahoo.com
Post published in: Arts