It is dead quiet when there is load shedding. Everything becomes so loud.
At 03h00, a siren cries. Its long wail wanders from the factory 5km away, over the squatter camps and railway crossing and then over my suburb, ascending for a few seconds before it goes down again. They must be working nightshift this week. Fifteen minutes later, it sounds again. Teatime is over.
Then a house alarm: “Reet! Reet! Reet!” Silence.
Next to me, my Jack Russel lets out a terrific sigh. Her warm little dog body shakes as it dreams. The terrier from next door barks. Then the pitbulls a few houses down, followed by the mongrels on the corner. Someone, or something, must be walking the streets.
Silence.
In the roof above me, the pipes in the old Germiston house groan and creak as it adjusts to the cooling temperature.
When I can’t sleep on nights like this, my ears are on alert.
But the sounds I am listening for, I don’t hear – the sounds of the angry mob, approaching with clanking pangas chanting: “Dubul’ ibhunu.”
The mighty rumbling I don’t hear. Yet.
When I was at school, we were taught a song about “The Young South Africa.” It was a song about a massive reverberation drifting across the veld. It was so vast it made hearts shudder. It was the song of a young nation awakening.
“Hoor jy die magtige dreuning. Oor die veld kom dit wyd gesweef.
Dit is die lied van ‘n volk se ontwaking. Wat harte laat sidder en beef.”
The song’s gist is not that dissimilar to ‘Kill the Boer’ or ‘De La Rey.’
It has that same rousing call to victory and unity. If you are in the right mood, it might make the hairs on your arms stand up and stir you to do your righteous duty to your volk or whichever fatherland to which you pledge allegiance.
The thing is, I was taught that song in 1980. South Africa declared itself independent from Britain in 1960 already. I was in school more than 30 years after the National Party (largely Afrikaans) took charge of South Africa’s considerable wealth and political clout. Die ‘jong’ South Africa was not so young when I was young. Yet there I was, marching up and down in a Voortrekker uniform planting a Vierkleur, understanding myself to be part of a liberation movement that was somehow yet to come to full fruition.
I was a terrible Voortrekker. I feel bad that I disgraced my family, but I couldn’t tie a knot if it saved me from a nagmars. It’s not that I had a particularly conscious political conscientious objection. I struggled to spell SOS correctly in morse code and thought it was silly to call everyone ‘neef’, ‘nig’ and ‘kameraad’ (comrade). Khaki is also a nasty colour; it makes the sweat stains stand out more. The R4 assault rifle training was superb, though.
Ah, but that’s a long time ago. Or is it?
It’s been 28 years since the ‘new’ South Africa. Three decades. Merely one generation, a blink of an eye should you look at it from a psycho-historical perspective. Behavioural sciences have taught us that if you are part of a group that has previously borne the brunt of generational degradation and suppression, you will be compelled to follow it with a need for revenge and reconquering. That’s what humans do. These cycles play themselves out over centuries. It is a wheel that keeps turning itself.
It is not the brief and brutal domination of one group over another, like in a territorial war, that appears to have the most significant influence on a sense of ‘payback’, but more so when there was an extended period of deliberate humiliation attached to the power assertion. That is how I, as a teenager, still felt an urge to avenge ‘my people’s undignified defeat at the hands of the British during the Boer War, more than 100 years ago. Hell, when I was a laaitie, we used to fight the Rooineks in the parkie after school. Of course, we went to separate schools but joined together in the public square for the glory of the battle. “Afrikaner, vrot banana!” they shouted. “Englishman, rubbish bin!” we shouted back. Then we bliksemed each other. Now some of us are married, that’s how it goes. But it takes time.
The riots, the ‘senseless’ acts of violence and destruction are reasonable and predictable human responses. However, the wheel is turning in South Africa, with poverty, Covid corruption, and the rising influence of armed groups taking over infrastructure control keeping it well-oiled.
From where I am, sitting upright in my bed in the middle of the night, pondering dark thoughts, I think some of us are going to get slaughtered. It will be terrifying, of course, and I would wish it hadn’t happened to me. I imagine myself looking my executioner in the eye and facing my demise with poise, but there will most likely be some last-second scrambling and swearing. It is the way of things. I am at peace with it.
I used to be one of those people who thought about the ANC: “Get over it, you’ve had 28 years.’ That is the most unreasonable expectation of all, followed shortly on its heels by ‘let’s pray for peace in Ukraine,’ where similar convolutions are unfolding.
I thought I would hear the mighty rumble during the winter uprisings of 2021. I could hear the gunshots and smell the burning tyres as the wind turned over Jerusalema informal settlement. I was harking for the wrong noise then. I know what to listen for now: an immense humming of many whimpers and shivers that might become a scream. A nation awakening from the slumber of rainbow nation dreams.
It is the cry of the ‘new’ Young South Africa.
You can hear it in the middle of the night moving down the street — torn soles flap between foot and road. There is a scraping sound as the plastic coasters grind along with tar. Someone has stolen a dustbin and is wheeling it towards the squatter camp at the end of the street. They sell the bins for scrap.
R20. It’s nothing. But when accompanied by centuries of fury – it is everything.