The Bang-Bang Club (17 page)

The terrified girl hid behind the door and yelled back that she was not their girlfriend. The sound of the Bad Boys trying to break down the door woke Mimi. In her feverish, confused state, she jumped out of bed and ran into the other room of the shack, away from the door. But the thugs had come around to the window and as they broke the glass, Mimi called out to her sister, ‘Sisi, what’s going ...?’ They shot her behind the ear, the bullet coming out through her mouth. The tsotsis climbed in through the window, ignored the young girl they had just shot, and took Mimi’s screaming sister away. On the way back to their hideout, they abducted another girl from a nearby house. The girls were locked in a shack, while their captors began smoking dagga (marijuana) and drinking, getting primed for the party in which the girls would be raped. They were not in a hurry, they knew that they could keep the
girls as long as they wished - the police would do nothing. At one stage, late in the night, the stoned gangsters lost concentration, and the girls seized the chance to escape.

Joyce listened to the story with growing horror and disbelief. She did not want to accept that her grandchild was dead, but as the oldest in the family, she was obliged the next day to go identify Mimi’s corpse at the government mortuary. When the mortuary attendant pulled out the drawer that contained Mimi, Joyce nearly fainted. She was naked and her one eye was hanging out of its socket. But Joyce steeled herself and examined her closely. Mimi’s hair was like it always was, blow-dried back - the tight curls fashionably relaxed, so that her hair was long and straight. The young girl’s breasts seemed surprisingly small - she had always had a large bust that Joyce used to playfully tease her about. Joyce was puzzled, did a person’s breasts shrink after they died? She was overcome by the thought that she wouldn’t see Mimi alive again.

That night, Joyce went back to Soweto. She slept uneasily and dreamt of Mimi. In the dream, Mimi hugged her as she did in life - coming up behind her grandmother and throwing her arms around her, her breasts pressing against Joyce’s back. Joyce said to her, ‘Take off your big breasts for me.’ Mimi just laughed, but Joyce insisted, asking why her breasts had been so small at the mortuary, but now they were once again their normal size. Mimi pulled away from her. Joyce turned and saw from the child’s face that she was upset. Mimi walked out of the shack and down to the street, without looking back, and then Joyce woke up. She could not get back to sleep and, in the morning, she told her daughter Tamara about the dream. Tamara reassured her that it was just a dream, that it meant nothing. But Joyce was deeply troubled, not just by the death, but by the idea that something unnatural had been visited on Mimi. She told her sister about the dream, who insisted they visit a traditional spirit medium, a sangoma, to see if anything supernatural had occurred. They asked around and were directed to a young sangoma. He put on his animal skin cloak to speak to his ancestors, and then he asked Joyce if she had come to see him about a female. Joyce said, ‘Yes.’ He asked if the person had been shot, and they
believed her to be dead. Joyce said that this was true. The sangoma told them that she was not dead. ‘She is alive. She is being kept where she used to live.’ He said that she was a zombie and described the zombie’s mistress. To Joyce, the sangoma’s description fitted that of Mimi’s middle-aged landlady. Joyce and her sister paid and left. They wanted to be sure, so they went to two more sangomas, both of whom told them the same thing. For Joyce, it was a glimmer of hope - if Mimi was not dead, but a zombie, then a powerful sangoma could free her from the curse and return Mimi to her.

Ten days later, Joyce returned to Thokoza for the funeral. She had to dress Mimi’s body. She had brought a pair of panties and a new T-shirt, but she was shaking badly when she approached the body. This time the body seemed different. Mimi’s breasts were soft, as if they were an old woman’s, and her torso was limp, but when Joyce pulled the panties on, she was surprised that from the waist down, her body was as hard as iron. The girl’s hair had been cut short, but it looked as if it was growing. Joyce began wondering why her hair was so short, why the breasts were like that, and why she was not completely stiff like a dead person should be? Her suspicions that Mimi was not really dead were strengthened.

After the church service, the schoolchildren proceeded to the graveyard on foot. They sang, ‘Mimi, we loved you. Mimi, we loved you,’ as they danced the militant toyi-toyi all the way to the cemetery. It was a large funeral with two bishops, three priests and several church choirs at the graveside. Joyce thought it was wonderful, except that it hurt so much because it was Mimi who was being buried.

The following day, Joyce and the family had to perform the traditional cleaning that follows a death - washing the blankets, linen and clothes of everyone in the house. Joyce returned to Soweto and went to see sangomas again, but different ones each time. It was unsettling and frightening, because they told her the same thing, all of them. They said that Mimi was working for the landlady, running her shebeen for her. Joyce was by now utterly convinced that Mimi was a zombie.

A week later, her Soweto neighbour ran over and told Joyce to switch on the radio, to listen to what was happening in Thokoza. The schoolchildren had caught up with one of the killers. They had tortured him until he gave up the names and whereabouts of the other Bad Boys who had taken part in Mimi’s killing. The children hunted them all down, and then stoned and burned them to death. But revenge did nothing to assuage the pain and anguish Joyce felt: she continued to dream of her granddaughter. In one recurrent dream, Mimi asked Joyce to come and fetch her because she could not escape by herself. But when Joyce asked her where she was being held, Mimi would just point, then vanish.

Joyce never accused the landlady of making Mimi into a zombie - she had no proof. Her only hope was to find a sangoma who could break the spell Mimi was under, who could exert enough supernatural power to free Mimi from her captor’s sorcery. She spent much of her scarce savings on charlatans who said they could help, but without success. I came to understand the zombie business as Joyce’s way of clinging to hope. If she forsook the possibility that Mimi was not really dead, then she would have to face the fact that her grandchild was never coming home again. But Joyce’s continued hope that one day her beloved Mimi would return masked a deep despair: ‘I know nothing about zombies, honestly. People say that they exist for a long time, until God takes them. Then they die.’

Sometimes I would grow angry with her, hearing of yet another experience of wasted money and dashed expectations. But I came to see that I was wrong, and rather than trying to divert Joyce from her superstition, I learnt that everyone has their own way of dealing with trauma. Joyce’s belief that Mimi was not really dead was not so different from my own belief that God would spare my mother from cancer.

9

INTELEZI

Death is natural
You are welcome to this funeral

Traditional Acholi funeral song

The constant exposure to war began to get to us. During one of the brief periods of calm following the Boipatong massacre, Joao and Kevin were at Joao’s flat smoking dagga and sharing a bottle of bourbon. Joao fumbled to construct a joint. Viv was pretending to be asleep - she was sick of the men and did not want to be included in their drunken talk. The conversation turned to women, relationships and emotional need. Joao was being hardcore: ‘I don’t need anyone.’ (Viv would confront him the next morning about being such an arsehole, and he would contritely apologize.)

Joao was still struggling with the joint and then dropped all of the dagga on to the floor. Joao was taken aback as Kevin got down on to his hands and knees, and began to lick the palm of his hand to pick up as much of the dagga as possible. Joao and Viv had four cats living inside the flat and the thought of smoking the fallen dope disgusted him. Joao threw Kevin the bag of dagga, ‘Fuck that, here’s more. That shit will be full of cat hair.’ Kevin looked at him strangely and said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like being an addict and not having!’

As they shared the cat-hair joint, their conversation moved on. Joao was adamant that there was a price to be paid for the pictures we took. This was something we hardly ever discussed. Kevin was having none of it and he was getting annoyed: ‘Retribution? In order to have retribution there has to be a sin!’ ‘There has to be retribution for the things we sometimes do!’ Joao persisted. ‘Are you saying what we do is a sin?’ Kevin asked.

Joao could not answer, but he felt that there had to be some form of retribution for watching people kill each other through our viewfinders when all we did was take pictures.

That night was the first time that Kevin had admitted to having an addiction to buttons and needing, not just choosing, drugs. Button-smokers crush a Mandrax tablet, a banned tranquillizer, and then mix it with dagga before stuffing it into a broken-off bottle neck. This so-called white pipe produces a powerful rush, often causing the smoker to keel over, before sinking into a couple of hours of sedated calm. Mandrax is not an elegant drug; button-kops (button-heads) share a communal spittoon into which they slobber, spit up phlegm and sometimes vomit.

Kevin was, however, paradoxically affected by Madrax. Instead of the usual mellow downer most people experienced, he got a jolt of energy. He would become all fired up with ideas and emotions. That was one of the reasons why Joao and I never realized the extent of his addiction-I always assumed that he could not be doing buttons when he was so hyper. One day in 1993, Joao went around to Kevin’s place. He knocked on the door for a while, but no one answered. He could hear loud music, so he knew that Kevin had to be in. Kevin finally opened the door and Joao was shocked to see that he was bleeding profusely from a cut above his eye. Kevin told him how he had been in Alexandra township and had gone down on one knee to take pictures when a young comrade had come running past and kicked him in the face. The hard edges of the camera had cut him above the eyebrow.

Joao followed Kevin to the backyard where he found a friend of Kevin’s, Reedwaan, holding a white pipe, and struggling to keep his
balance. Joao grew a little suspicious - the wound seemed fresh and he could see that Kevin and Reedwaan were swaying all over the place. They offered Joao a bust on the pipe; he refused and left. Years later Joao found a roll of black-and-white film of pictures of Kevin in his backyard posing with boxing gloves and the blood from a cut above his eye running down the bridge of his nose. When we asked Reedwaan, he admitted that the story Kevin had told Joao and the rest of us about the Alex incident had been concocted. Kevin had cut himself by falling into a rosebush in the yard after he had bust a pipe and the rush hit him. Most button-smokers sit down while smoking and let themselves keel over when the drug takes effect, but Kevin would inexplicably stand up and then fall over. This habit irritated Reedwaan because it interfered with his own high - he always had to keep an eye on Kevin. On a couple of occasions Kevin had nearly gone over a balcony while rushing.

By late 1992, Kevin was fast approaching burn-out and we all were pretty strung out. He eased off covering the violence and took up being a late-night disc-jockey part-time. If I was awake at midnight, I would listen to him. He had a good radio voice - warm and rich; sometimes he would say something to us over the air between songs. While he did not leave news-photography altogether, he joined us on fewer dawn patrols - hardly surprising since his radio show ended at five in the morning. Ken had also eased off on the morning cruising, leaving Joao and me to do it alone much of the time. Ken’s life was pretty taken up with his work in the photo department at
The Star
, and his marriage to Monica was an intense, claustrophobic affair that naturally excluded the rest of us. But he would sometimes tell us stories of times when their emotions went way over the edge. On one occasion, Ken was on his way to shoot a boxing match in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, an hour-and-a-half drive from Johannesburg. Monica called him and said she wanted him back, I forget the details of why, but she told him that she was going to start tearing up his pictures one by one until he got back. Ken knew she was capable of it and immediately turned around and returned home. In another much-told Ken and Monica incident:
they were having a fight that became nasty. In a rage, Monica began to burn a pile of cash that was in a fruit bowl in the dining-room. Ken had been saving up for an expensive leather jacket and there was a lot of money in the bowl. Crazy as it was of Monica to burn the banknotes, I found it even stranger that Ken apparently made no attempt to stop her. We heard other stories in a similar vein, of broken plates and record collections. Their fights became legendary and whenever they invited any of us over for dinner or a birthday party we never quite knew how the evening would end.

Kevin’s love life was just as bizarre as Ken’s. He had a thing for a fellow journalist who, though attracted to him, did not want to have a relationship with him. But she liked having him around and while she would not allow him to sleep with her, they would hold hands, kiss, that kind of stuff - the romance without the sex. He was beside himself; the more she played him, the harder he threw himself at her. I was friendly with both of them, but she was of course making his life hell. Joao and Viv, on the other hand, were a stable, loving couple whose only problem was that Viv felt herself being kept at a distance because Joao would rarely discuss the details of what had happened to him during the day. But she preferred it that way - she would have worried far more had she heard the gory details of the township war every day.