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Ubuntu
Chapter One

MAKHADO warily made his way across Hillbrow, a seedy section of Johannesburg, the third largest city in Africa behind Cairo and Lagos. It was around five o’clock. Rush-hour traffic clogged the narrow street, whose cracked sidewalks were swarming with prostitutes, pickpockets, drunkards, beggars, the homeless and glue-sniffing street kids. Stench from mounds of rotting garbage assailed Makhado’s flaring nostrils, making him shudder.

Approaching a sleazy-looking bar, he quickened his pace. Dressed in a well-worn but neat plaid suit and clutching a frayed suitcase, he was anxious to get to the railroad station on Rissik Street to board the 8 p.m. train back to his village near Kruger National Park in the Northern Transvaal.

Outside the entrance to the bar, which was rocking with lively township jive music called Mbaqanga, several prostitutes in tight leather miniskirts, sharp-pointed high heels and garish make-up leered at him.

"I can make you feel young again, old man," one of them said with a coquettish wriggle of her large hips.

"I like being old," Makhado said tersely and kept walking.

Downtown Johannesburg

Two long blocks later Makhado turned left into a side street lined with shops, restaurants and rundown residential and apartment hotels. He carefully zigzagged his way down the narrow sidewalk choked with hawkers selling all kinds of wares: shoes, sunglasses, suitcases, purses, pots, pans, dishes, fruit, vegetables, necklaces, bracelets, scarves, groceries, belts, ties, watches and mattresses. There was hardly any room for pedestrians. Makhado jumped off the sidewalk to avoid a rather aggressive turbaned hawker who was waving a pair of gigantic Nike sneakers while chanting in a thick West African accent, "Nice—Cheap—American."

Makhado shook his graying head as he came to a stop at a traffic light that was just turning from yellow to red. He was shocked by how overcrowded and rundown downtown Johannesburg had become since the abolition of apartheid, and by how much the area had been taken over by immigrants, legal and illegal.

Suddenly Makhado heard a loud scream. His pulse quickened and his sinewy muscles tensed. Barely seconds after hearing the scream he saw hawkers and pedestrians fleeing in every direction. Overturned tables scattered wares all over the sidewalk and into the street. Cars shot through the red light. Horns blared and tires screeched as brakes were slammed to avoid a pile-up in the middle of the intersection.

Makhado’s big black eyes cast wildly about for the cause of the pandemonium. In an instant he saw it. About fifteen to twenty feet behind him, two armed men were attempting to carjack a red Mazda Millennia.

"The keys, bitch, or I’ll kill you!" one of the carjackers hissed. His gloved right hand coldly aimed a nine-millimeter Makarov pistol at the head of the white woman in a light-blue dress cowering behind the Mazda’s steering wheel. The second carjacker grabbed the back door handle, poised to jump in as soon as his partner had secured the keys.

But for some reason the white woman refused to budge. Her trembling hands remained glued to the steering wheel. Her screams for help grew louder and more desperate.

With an instinct born of his years as a warrior, Makhado sprang into action. Adrenaline surging through his veins, and heedless of danger, he dropped the suitcase and charged like a raging rhino down the now-deserted sidewalk. He barreled straight into the side of the unsuspecting carjacker, who was still holding the gun to the white woman’s head.

Makhado and the carjacker fell hard onto the concrete pavement. The gun flew out of the carjacker’s hand and clattered in the middle of the street. The second carjacker was so stunned by everything that instead of coming to his partner’s rescue he turned and fled, disappearing around a corner.

Makhado wrestled with the fallen carjacker, who was much younger and had a jagged scar across the left cheek. Makhado’s hands, unusually strong for a man nearing sixty-five, grasped the carjacker’s throat in a vice-like grip. The carjacker gasped for air, his eyes bulged, and his limbs thrashed about wildly.

One of the carjacker’s flailing elbows jabbed Makhado’s left eye. Momentarily blinded, Makhado let go of the carjacker’s throat. That was the break the carjacker needed. Dazed, he scrambled to his feet and ran down the street, minus his nine-millimeter, just as people who’d fled into nearby buildings for cover reappeared, seeing that the worst was over.

At that moment a black Opel Kadette came screeching around the corner, siren blaring. Two uniformed police officers from the Johannesburg anti-hijacking unit, one black and the other white, jumped out of the Opel, guns drawn. The white officer dashed toward the Mazda while the black officer quizzed onlookers about what had happened.

The white officer peered through the Mazda’s half-open window.

"Are you okay, Miss?" he asked the shaken white woman, who was still clutching the steering wheel, breathing hard. She’d stopped trembling. Tall and slender, with shoulder-length honey-blonde hair and an aquiline nose sprinkled with a smattering of freckles, she looked no more than thirty.

"Ja," the woman replied softly in an Afrikaans accent, letting out a deep sigh of relief. Her marine-blue eyes, glazed with tears, kept blinking rapidly. "Thanks to that man over there." She half-raised her left hand and pointed at Makhado, who was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by chattering and impressed onlookers.

"What’s your name?" asked the white officer after holstering his gun and taking out a notepad. His tone sounded somewhat jaded. This was the tenth carjacking he and his partner had responded to since noon.

"Liefling," said the white woman. "Liefling Malan."

The officer jotted down the information. "Where do you live?"

"Cape Town."

"What are you doing in Jo’burg?"

"I was attending a human rights conference at Wits University. I’m on my way to the airport. This is a rental car."

The officer asked Liefling a few more questions, then he and his colleague, who’d also been asking Makhado questions, left abruptly following a dispatch. Another carjacking was reportedly in progress near city hall on Market Street and there were reports of an exchange of gunfire between the carjackers and the owner of a brand-new gray BMW 328i.

It was Friday afternoon, and the limited resources of the undermanned and overworked police force were no match for heavily-armed carjackers in a city which the previous year had suffered more than 3,000 carjackings.

Liefling got out of the Mazda. After making sure it was locked, she walked over to where Makhado was standing talking to a group of blacks who were congratulating him on his bravery and asking him all kinds of questions. Makhado was surprised to see Liefling coming toward him. He thought she’d have driven off by now, glad to be alive. The small crowd around Makhado dispersed as Liefling approached.

"Thank you very much for saving my life," she said gratefully, shaking Makhado’s work-gnarled hand.

"You’re welcome, madam," Makhado said tentatively.

"Please don’t call me ‘madam.’ My name is Liefling. What’ s yours?"

Having addressed white people as "madam" and "baas (master)" all his life in deference to their superior status under apartheid, Makhado instantly realized from Liefling’s rejection of this form of address that she was different. He decided to let down his guard. She would not call him a "cheeky kaffir," as he’d been called many times by whites when he’d inadvertently violated the master-servant etiquette that was still very much alive in South Africa, despite black majority rule and the abolition of apartheid.

"Makhado," he said. "Makhado Samson Munyai."

"Where are you going, Makhado?"

"To the railroad station."

"Can I give you a lift?"

Makhado hesitated, then said, "No, thank you. I’ll walk."

"But it’s more than eight blocks away." She looked at his hand. "And you’re carrying a heavy suitcase."

"Okay." Makhado followed Liefling to her Mazda. He instinctively reached for the back door.

"No, get in front," Liefling said from the driver’s side.

Makhado cast a suspicious glance at Liefling. What kind of white woman is this? he wondered. She’s not afraid or ashamed to ride in the front seat with a black man.

Guessing what Makhado was thinking, Liefling smiled warmly, revealing a set of perfectly straight, bright teeth.

"Apartheid is dead, Makhado," she said. "It’s now okay for a black and a white to sit together in the front seat of a car."

"Old habits die hard, Liefling," Makhado said, smiling back as he tossed his suitcase on to the backseat. He climbed in beside her.

"Where are you from?" Liefling asked.

"Venda."

"Is it your first time in Jo’burg?"

Makhado nodded. "First time since I was endorsed out in 1979."

"Endorsed out? Why?"

"It’s a long story."

"I’m eager to hear it, if you don’t mind," Liefling said, fastening her seat belt. Makhado did the same.

Makhado coughed slightly to clear his throat. "Well," he began, "I first came to Johannesburg as a mineworker in 1960, two months after the Sharpeville Massacre. For nearly three years I lived in a single men’s hostel, separated from my wife and four children. Under the terms of my work permit, I could only see them once a year. During the Christmas holidays. It was very hard living like that."

"I can imagine," Liefling said with empathy as she started the car and rejoined traffic. "Influx Control was the cruelest apartheid law. The government used it to break up millions of black families."

"But I refused to let it break up my family."

"How did you do that? The law was so hard to get around."

"I left the mines."

Liefling signaled for a left turn as the Mazda approached a busy intersection. After her narrow escape from carjackers, her eyes were now on the lookout for suspicious movement from any of the pedestrians crossing the street, or the occupants of the cars next to hers.

"Didn’t you lose your work permit?" she asked Makhado as the Mazda completed its left turn.

"I did. But at least I was reunited with my family."

"So you went back to Venda?"

"No. I couldn’t go back. There was no work there."

"Where did you live?"

"I rented a shack in Alexandra."

"What did you do for work?"

"I worked at odd jobs here and there. Illegally. And my wife operated a shebeen (speakeasy). Life was okay. We even managed to send our youngest child to university, despite the fact that whenever I was between jobs, I was often arrested for the crime of being unemployed."

Liefling shook her head as she remembered the peculiar crime of being unemployed, which only blacks could commit, and the Catch-22 it entailed. During the apartheid era millions of jobless black men had been thrown in jail as "vagrants" and "undesirables." But to get jobs they first needed to obtain special permits proving that they had satisfied all the necessary laws for working in white areas, permits that the authorities refused to grant without the applicants already having jobs.

"In 1972," Makhado went on, "I was hired as a security guard for Barclays bank in Hillbrow. My employers petitioned the government to grant me a work-permit because I was one of their best employees. I got the permit. But one day in 1979, shortly after Venda was granted its so-called independence, the police raided my shack around 4 a.m. This time they arrested me for harboring my wife and children as illegal aliens."

As she turned left into Twist Street, Liefling fought back tears. Makhado’s story had made her recall other wrenching stories of the pain and suffering wrought by the Influx Control law, a cornerstone of apartheid, under which the government had had the absolute power to decide which blacks could legally stay in "white" South Africa, and had made it a crime for migrant workers to live with their families. While a student at the liberal University of Cape Town (UCT) where she’d double-majored in Sociology and Literature, she’d done extensive research on the law’s devastating impact on black families, black communities and the black psyche.

"I was taken to the notorious Number Four prison to await trial," Makhado said, anger slowly creeping into his usually calm voice at the recollection, despite the passage of many years. "When I appeared before the magistrate ten days later he ordered that my family and I be immediately deported back to Venda. I’ve been living there ever since. And in the rural areas time has sort of stood still. Many white people, who are mostly Boers (Afrikaner farmers), continue to cling to the old ways."

"You’d be surprised how many people in the cities still cling to the old ways," Liefling said, throwing a quick glance at the side-view mirror before switching lanes. "I recently broke up with a boyfriend because he called black people kaffirs."

Makhado stared at Liefling in disbelief. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. "You broke up with your boyfriend because he called blacks kaffirs?"

"I did."

"But many white people still call us kaffirs," Makhado said. "Not only that, but they still treat us worse than animals."

"I know," Liefling said, recalling two recent shocking racial incidents that had made headlines. Both involved farmers in rural areas. One had strangled and decapitated two of his black workers because one of them called him by his first name instead of ‘baas"; another had shot and killed one of his black laborers because he mistook him for a dog.

"A lot of whites are still racist, Makhado," Liefling went on, "despite the end of apartheid. In fact, I’ve been called a kaffir-lover many times for speaking out against white racism."

Makhado was stunned by Liefling’s frankness about her personal life and racial attitude. They were qualities he’d never encountered in a white person. He was eager to find out what made her so refreshingly different from other Afrikaners he’d known and come to hate for treating him and his fellow blacks as kaffirs.

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This site was last edited on
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